


You Haven't To Deserve

by Alex51324



Series: Finding Home--the Dreaded Bonding AU [2]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, M/M, Sentinel/Guide Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 08:54:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 70,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/951150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex51324/pseuds/Alex51324
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Second story of the Dreaded Bonding AU/Finding Home trilogy.   G-TAC, the Guide Training and Assignment Center, continues to throw up road blocks for Jim and Blair, and their new friends Kas and Angel Temas are drawn into the struggle.  Slash.  </p>
<p>Rated mature for violence, sex, and swearing.  Contains brief scenes of torture, also domestic conflict that may be triggery for readers particularly sensitive to themes of partner violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Haven't To Deserve

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by Simplystars; title from Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man."

The next week, Lorelei from G-TAC called the station. Jim leaned over so that Blair—who was sitting next to him—could hear what she had to say, motioning for him to keep quiet. 

“How is it working out with Sandburg?” Lorelei asked. “Have you had any more problems?”

_More_? “No, it’s great. No problems at all. Have you located his personal effects yet?”

“We have,” Lorelei said regretfully. “We identified what appears to be stolen property in his suitcase.”

Jim put his hand over Blair’s mouth before he could protest. “Let me guess—it’s a laptop belonging to the University of Barcelona anthropology department. He’s been worrying about that.”

“Oh. Well, you can understand why we were concerned.”

“Because he had a computer that belonged to his previous employer?” Jim asked, letting his skepticism show. “We’ll take care of getting it back to the University—he’ll want to get his data off it first.”

Lorelei cleared her throat. “Very well. You can pick up his things during normal business hours.”

It was four-thirty, of course—not enough time to get over to the G-TAC offices before they closed. “First thing in the morning,” Jim said. “Anything else?”

“Yes—we understand he’ll be beginning work after his casts are removed in three weeks?”

Jim’s eyes met Blair’s. “That’s the plan.” 

“We’ll be in touch that week to discuss ways that his performance can be improved.”

“Fine. Talk to you then.” He hung up, removing his hand from Blair’s mouth at the same time.

“That bitch!” Blair exclaimed. “Stolen property, my hairy ass. If anybody had just _asked_ , I’d have told them all about it.”

Jim nodded. Lorelei had been helpful enough that day in G-TAC, but there was something about her that rubbed him the wrong way. 

“And now you’re lying to G-TAC,” Blair added, grinning. “They’re going to think I’m a bad influence.”

“I wasn’t lying—that _was_ the plan.” He wasn’t sure why he _had_ lied, but it seemed like a good idea. If G-TAC assumed Blair was still at home and helpless, they wouldn’t try anything. Not that he was sure what they _could_ try, but he was sure they had something up their sleeves. “You’re waiting in the truck when I go in for your stuff tomorrow,” Jim added. 

“No argument here.”

“Good. You’re never setting foot in that place again, if I have anything to say about it.”

“Hey, I might be stubborn, but I’m not crazy.” 

Jim showed up at G-TAC ready for a fight, but receptionist just handed over a wheeled suitcase and a leather knapsack in return for his signature on a form. “He’ll check the contents today, and we’ll get back to you if anything’s missing,” Jim said.

“Of course.”

Back in the truck, Blair ran his hands over the knapsack. “Man, I thought I’d never see this thing again. It was a present from Dr. Stoddard, when I left for study abroad.” He fumbled with the clasp, which obviously required more than one finger to unfasten.

Jim reached over and opened it for him. 

“Here’s my paper I was going to give,” Blair said, fishing out a handful of pages. “Probably good they didn’t read it, huh? I don’t even remember what else I had in here…half a bottle of orange juice, we might want to get a haz-mat team in to deal with that. Ooh, I forgot I was reading this…”

Helping Sandburg unpack his suitcase later that night was like looking into the past, at the man Blair had been before G-TAC got their hands on him. Jim was reminded again that just a little over a year and a half ago, G-TAC had taken in a young man with a bright future, and had reduced him to—well, to being chained naked to a wall, where he’d still been doing his damndest to stand up to a guy whose idea of a great career choice was beating up Guides for a living. 

Now, after nearly a month with Jim, Blair was back on his feet and seemed happy and confident—at least, most of the time. Jim had a feeling Blair was running as fast as he could to hide, even to himself, how deeply the events of the last year had affected him. There was a certain brittle cheerfulness to the way he directed Jim to arrange his things around his room.

“We need to get you some bookshelves in here,” Jim observed. Apart from hanging a curtain over the doorway and putting in a dresser and a small rug by the bed, they hadn’t gotten very far with fixing up Blair’s room.

“I could use a desk, too,” Blair said. “When the semester ends, we should drive around near campus, where the off-campus student apartments are.”

“Okay,” Jim said, trying to figure out how those two ideas fit together. “Why?”

“Oh, the kids who come from money throw away all kinds of great stuff, just so they don’t have to bother schlepping it home for the summer. You can furnish a whole apartment that way, if it doesn’t rain too much.”

“I can afford to buy you a desk,” Jim explained patiently. “You don’t need to dig through other people’s garbage.”

“You’ll see, man,” Blair said. “Really great stuff. I mean, I can see how when it comes to the upholstered stuff, the idea might be a little gross. But something like a desk, as long as you have Lysol, there’s not a thing wrong with it. It’s a crime, sending perfectly good things to a landfill when somebody else could use them.”

He had a point, but Jim still wasn’t bringing anything that had been put out for the trash into his apartment. “Okay, we’ll buy one at the Salvation Army or a flea market or something.”

“Okay, if you want to waste your money, that’s cool.”

“Thank you.” Jim looked around for a place to hang Sandburg’s sport coat. Not finding one, he gave up and folded it into a dresser drawer. There was plenty of room for it, alongside the few clothes Jim had bought for Blair so far, and the few others from his luggage. “Good thing they gave this back—we have to be in court at the end of the week.” Mark Cahill’s preliminary hearing was coming up.

“Oh, I have to go to that?”

“You don’t _have_ to, but it’s procedure. They won’t ask you anything,” he added. 

“Okay.”

“You could stay home, if you’d rather.”

“No, it’s cool.”

When Jim dressed Sandburg for court a few days later, he looked like a new man. Apart from his hair, which was growing out raggedly, he looked neat and polished, professional as any Guide Jim had ever seen. “Looking good, Chief,” Jim said. 

“Yeah, wearing grown-up clothes makes a nice change, but wait till you have to walk me to the men’s room and unzip my pants for me,” Blair said. Holding up his casts, he added, “This shit’s really getting old.”

“Couple more weeks, Chief.” 

“Believe me, I’m counting the days. I have big plans,” he added with a wink.

“Oh yeah?” They’d been together twice more since that first time—nothing more intense than touching and licking and rubbing, but Blair had proven surprisingly inventive within the obvious limitations. “What kind of plans?”

“First I’m going to scratch my own ass,” Blair said, with obvious longing. “Then I’m going to brush my own teeth. Then take a shower all by myself…then take a shower with you, because you’ve been getting to put your hands all over me, and that is just not fair. And then,” he stepped up to Jim, pressing against his front, and slid his casted hands around to rest on his ass. “And then I’ll do some of this,” he added, nibbling at Jim’s neck. “And then we’ll figure it out from there.”

Jim took the time for a kiss before reluctantly pulling away. “We can’t be late for court.”

“I’m gonna have to insist on a rain check,” Blair informed him. “To be redeemed at the end of the work day.”

“It’s a date.”

#

“Are you ready?” Dr. Temas asked, holding up the small circular saw.

“I’ve been ready for days,” Blair told him. Temas had done a final set of x-rays to confirm that his casts were ready to be removed as scheduled, and now it was finally time. 

“Yeah, I’m getting tired of waiting on him hand and foot,” Jim added, giving Blair’s shoulder a pat. 

“The muscles in your hands will have atrophied,” Temas warned them. “It’ll take some time before you get your strength back.”

“I figured,” Blair said. That detail had slipped his mind, a few times, when he was daydreaming about the elaborate plans he had for his hands, but being able to use them at all would be a big improvement.

Dr. Temas started the saw. The high-pitched whine of it set Blair’s teeth on edge; he wondered how Jim and Temas dealt with it.

When Temas lowered the saw to his hand, visions of his hand being split in half like a plank of wood flashed behind his eyes. Not pulling away took a real effort. 

Jim steadied him with a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Chief.”

He nodded, tilting his head to rest his cheek against Jim’s hand. 

Temas knew what he was doing with the saw, though—Blair felt the heat of it against his skin, but when Temas finished cutting down both sides and cracked the cast open like a lobster claw, there wasn’t so much as a scratch on his skin. 

His skin had, however, gone gray, with patches of dead skin coming off in clumps, like a cartoon zombie. It stank to high heaven, too—Blair saw both Sentinels recoil. “Oh, man, that’s gross.”

“Uh-huh,” Temas said. “All of the skin cells that would normally slough off invisibly over the last few weeks were trapped in there. Along with sweat, skin mites—all kind of nice things. Kas?”

Kas started cleaning off his hand with warm water and a sponge, while Temas got to work on the other cast. The second hand looked pretty much like the first, except that there was an interesting contrast between his thumb, which looked basically normal, and the zombified rest of his hand. 

When Kas finished with his left hand, Blair held it up in front of him, tentatively. He felt curiously disconnected from it, as if it wasn’t really his. Carefully, he touched the tip of each finger to his thumb. 

“Just hold on a minute,” Temas said. Taking Blair’s hand, he gently manipulated the joints, asking, “Does this hurt? No? How about this?”

After examining both hands, Temas pronounced them in good shape. “Your range of motion looks pretty reasonable. They aren’t perfect, but you’re going to notice a big improvement over what you’ve gotten used to these last few weeks. We’ll have to see how it goes as you regain strength and flexibility.”

Blair examined his own hands for a moment, checking out what he could do with them. They did feel pretty weak—but that was way, way better than having them encased in plaster. Turning around, he rested one palm along Jim’s cheek, marveling at the feeling of muscle and stubble against his skin.

Jim smiled at him, and gently took Blair’s other hand in his, running his thumb over the newly-healed bones. 

“There will probably be some swelling over the next 24 hours or so,” Temas explained. “You can soak them in cool water to reduce it. The other thing to be really careful about is overdoing it—you should really take it easy on them for the next month, but especially the next few days. I’m going to give you some exercises to do, but don’t go over the recommended amount—doing extra won’t make you recover any sooner.”

Jim pointedly poked him in the shoulder. 

“I totally wouldn’t do that.” 

“Uh-huh.” 

#

“If I offer to help you with that, you’re going to tell me to go fuck myself, right?” Jim asked. He had finished eating about ten minutes ago, but Blair was barely half done, and clearly struggling with his fork and knife.

“I’d probably start with ‘no thanks,’” Blair said. “But yeah, I’d go up to ‘go fuck yourself.’”

“I’m glad I didn’t make spaghetti.” 

“Yeah, yeah, laugh while you can.” 

“I’m not laughing,” Jim assured him. “I’m really glad you’re…” He gestured. “Better.”

“Me too. And hey, after I’m done here, we can--” He gestured suggestively.

“It seems like that might be the kind of thing Dr. Temas was saying you shouldn’t do right away,” Jim pointed out. 

“Don’t care. Fuck this,” Blair added, finally dropping his fork and scooping up some mashed potatoes with his fingers. 

That was much more efficient, anyway. A little disgusting to watch, but not as painful as watching him struggle to hold a fork. 

“I’m starting the dishes,” Jim announced. 

He was finished with all of the other dishes by the time Blair was done with his plate. Blair carried it over to him, setting it down on the counter with a little flourish, then wandered around the kitchen touching things. When Jim had dried the plate and put it away, Blair took his hand and pulled him over to the couch, sitting close to him and hugging Jim’s arm against his chest.

“What’s wrong, Chief?” 

Blair shook his head. “I don’t know. I feel weird.”

“Sick?” Jim asked, putting a hand on his forehead. 

“No—just, weird. Kind of twitchy and paranoid.” He got up, wrenching away from Jim’s embrace, and paced frantically, shaking his arms. “Oh, man.” 

Jim stood up cautiously. Blair stank of adrenaline, and his heart was pounding, his breath coming in short gasps. After a moment, Blair collided with him, pressing into his chest for a moment, then bounced off of him and resumed pacing.

“I need—I need—I don’t know what the hell I need.” Blair stopped by one of the windows, laying his forehead against the cool glass. He stayed still only for a moment, then spun around. “Fuck me.”

“What?”

“Fuck me,” Blair repeated. “Might settle me down. I don’t know. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

Jim stared at him. “No.”

Blair stared back and swallowed hard. “Please?”

“No. Chief, I don’t think you really want to, not when you’re—like this.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, our first time should be, be—special.” Blair laughed hollowly. “Man, I don’t know what I—Jim?” he said in a small voice.

“Yeah, Chief?”

“I don’t feel so good.” 

Jim managed to get him into the bathroom before he threw up. Once his stomach was empty, Blair’s vital signs returned to something near normal, and the adrenaline tang eased off, although his clothes were saturated with a cold sweat and he was trembling, his teeth chattering. Jim sat him on the closed toilet lid and wiped his face with a washcloth. “I think you should lie down,” Jim suggested gently.

Blair gulped and nodded. With a brief detour to the kitchen to pick up a bucket, just in case Blair had to throw up again, Jim took him to his room. Blair quietly allowed Jim to change him out of his sweaty clothes and into clean pyjamas, then curled up on the bed. “S-stay with me?” he asked quietly.

“Sure.” Jim kicked off his shoes and stretched out behind him, pulling Blair in close. 

Slowly, the shakes eased. “Jim?” Blair said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It’s okay,” Jim said, rubbing his arm. “You’re fine. Nothing to be sorry for.”

“Thanks, Jim.” After a long moment Blair said, “I’m so tired.”

“Go to sleep,” Jim suggested. 

“Mm. Good idea.”

Jim sat watch as Blair fell into a restless doze, occasionally twitching or muttering, his heart racing, until Jim soothed him back into sleep. Finally, around midnight, he quieted, and Jim fell into his own guarded sleep.

#

The next morning, Blair popped out of bed as bouncy and cheerful as anything. “Can we have eggs this morning, Jim? I’m _starving_.”

“Sure,” Jim said. “You want the first shower?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, cool.” Blair dug in his dresser drawers and came out with a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt. “I don’t know what that was last night—stomach flu, I guess.”

“One of those twenty-four minute things?” Jim asked. He didn’t know what it had been, either, but he was pretty sure stomach flu wasn’t it. 

“Well, you know, you always feel better after you puke.”

While Blair showered, Jim got some eggs stirred up and ready to go, and started the bacon. “Think you can keep an eye on this while I grab a shower, Chief?” he asked when Blair came into the kitchen.

“Sure.” Blair took over in front of the stove, poking at the bacon with a fork. 

It turned out that their morning routine went much more quickly with Blair able to feed and dress himself, and even help with the cooking. They arrived at the station almost half an hour early. 

Blair used the extra time to commandeer the old electric typewriter from Rhonda’s office and get started on his University application forms. Dr. Stoddard had come up with a way for Blair to get around the application deadline, by registering as a non-degree-seeking student. Jim didn’t like the sound of that—the whole point was that Blair _was_ going to get his degree—but both Blair and the professor seemed sure that it would be no problem—he’d apply for candidacy next year, Blair explained, and then his credits would transfer anyway. “It’s just something for them to put on the paperwork instead of ‘we’re making an exception because we like you,’” Blair had said. “You know how it is.”

The non-degree-seeking student application was short, not requiring much more than a name, address, and checkbook. Blair polished it off well before their work shift officially began, and came back to Jim’s desk. “Now I just have to get my transcripts sent over from Spain. And from Rainer. Can you believe I have to pay them five bucks to send my official transcript to themselves? It’s a scam. I’m getting some coffee—you want one?”

Jim started to get up from his desk when Sandburg announced his plans, forgetting for a moment that Blair didn’t need his help to get a cup of coffee anymore. “Yeah, thanks.”

Sandburg had only been gone for a moment, though, when Jim started to wonder if he was coming down with Blair’s “stomach flu” from the night before. He wouldn’t go quite so far as to say he felt twitchy and paranoid, but he was definitely on edge. It was only a moment later, though, that he found out the source of his discomfort. Just as Blair reemerged from the break room, Lorelei Marks, from G-TAC, came into Major Crimes.

Blair was holding a cup of coffee in each hand, but as he passed H’s desk, one hand slipped sideways, spilling coffee all over the floor and the side of the desk. As Sandburg tried to stop the mess, he ended up breaking and shattering both cups. “Oh, fuck,” he said.

With a sidelong glance at Lorelei, Jim headed to Blair’s side. “You probably shouldn’t have tried to carry two at once,” Jim said.

“Yeah, no shit. Do you guys have a mop around here somewhere?” Blair looked around, as if expecting to see a mop propped up next to Rafe’s desk or something. Jim saw that he noticed Lorelei, but looked right past her. 

Jim decided to ignore her too, and helped Blair clean up the worst of the mess with some paper towels, then put in a call to building maintenance. Finally, they went back to the break room, where Jim fixed two more cups of coffee. Handing Blair his, he said, “Maybe use two hands on that for now.”

“Uh-huh.”

Lorelei was at their desk when they got back to it, sitting in Blair’s chair and making notes on a clipboard she carried. Staring at her, Jim cleared his throat and pointed at the visitor’s chair on the other side of the desk. Lorelei stared at him as if she had no idea what he could possibly mean.

“Uh, that’s kind of my spot,” Blair explained. “You can sit over here,” he added helpfully.

Jim began to wonder if Blair had any idea who she was. Maybe not—it could be that the only time he’d actually seen her was that first day at G-TAC, when he hadn’t really been in any condition to keep track of faces.

Slowly, Lorelei got up and moved to the chair Jim had indicated. Blair reclaimed his own seat, looking at her expectantly. 

Crossing her legs knee-over-knee, Lorelei finally said, “Good morning Blair, Detective Ellison.”

“Morning,” Jim said. “Chief, this is Lorelei Marks, our G-TAC caseworker.”

“Oh.” Jim had definitely been right about Blair not knowing who she was—now that he knew, his heart rate speeded up noticeably. “Hi.”

“What can we do for you?” Jim asked, keeping his voice as neutral as possible.

“I’m simply here to see how Blair’s placement is working out. I’ll be observing throughout the day; just do whatever you would ordinarily do.”

Jim was careful to keep any of his thoughts from showing on his face. Lorelei had shown up first thing in the morning on what she _thought_ was Blair’s first day at work. There was no way in hell she thought that would give an accurate impression of how his “placement” was going. Sandburg’s actual first day had gone pretty well, but it wouldn’t be unexpected, or unusual, for him to make a lot of mistakes and generally be ill at ease. 

Unfortunately, she had every right to be there—it was standard practice for G-TAC to observe Guides at some point in a new placement. “All right,” Jim said carefully. “Have you spoken to Captain Banks?”

“I plan to.”

“Well, if you’re going to be observing today, you’ll have to get authorization from him. His office is over there.” He pointed. 

Lorelei adjusted her legs and looked back at him.

“It says ‘Captain Banks’ on the door. You can’t miss it.” 

She tossed her head slightly and stared him in the eye.

“Should I walk you over there?”

Finally, Lorelei stood up, adjusted the hem of her suit jacket, and went over to Simon’s office.

“Wow,” Blair said, once she was out of earshot. “Did you see how she was staring at you? Classic threat display. And baring her teeth? There’s not a primate in the world that would misinterpret that shit.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. 

“Don’t worry, you won. She totally backed down. Hey, what’s Simon saying to her?”

“I can’t eavesdrop on a private conversation,” Jim argued.

“Sure you can. Come on, he has to be handing her ass to her.”

Jim wavered, then gave into temptation. 

“—history of insubordinate and inappropriate behavior,” she was saying. “Don’t hesitate to contact me immediately if you have any concerns. We intend to take swift and appropriate action to address any problems before they have a chance to grow.”

“I’m sure you do,” Simon said after a long moment. Jim bet that Lorelei wouldn’t be able to detect the carefully restrained anger in his tone. Simon hadn’t risen to the rank of Captain without having the ability to play things close to the vest. “So far, Sandburg has been a tremendous asset to the department.”

“Well, if that ever changes, let me know immediately. It wouldn’t be at all unusual for him to be on his best behavior in these early days.”

“Ms. Marks, while of course you’re welcome to observe in the office today, but for safety reasons we can’t allow you to ride along when Detective Ellison and Mr. Sandburg work in the field. And if you in any way disrupt my detectives’ work, you will be asked to leave. Do I make myself clear?”

“Of course. I have no intention of causing any disruption.”

Jim started going through the open cases on his desk, looking for anything that would get them out of the office. Maybe they could re-interview the neighbors on those burglary cases. Not that they would suddenly remember having seen anything—unless they started remembering things they _hadn’t_ seen—but the robberies had happened mid-morning, when the homeowners were out at work, so re-canvassing the neighborhood at about the same time of day was defensible. And then in the afternoon they could re-check the pawnshops and antique stores for the stolen goods. “He just told her she can’t ride along with us when we leave,” Jim relayed to Sandburg, “so we’ll get out of here in about an hour.”

“Good idea.”

“For now, let’s keep looking for links between the victims on those robbery cases. You want to do the background checks?”

“Sure.” They had already finished the background checks of the victims, and now were on to checking into the various cleaning women, water delivery guys, pool boys, and others who had access to the victims’ homes. Blair accepted the list of names. “Rafe, are you using your computer?”

“All yours, kid.”

“We need to get you your own computer.”

“Yeah—hey, Barcelona may not want that laptop back, actually—Dr. Navarro told me they replaced all of those old ones a few months back. Since it’s going to cost more to send it back than it’s actually worth, she’s checking into it for me—if they tell me not to bother, we can get it set up on the network here.”

Jim nodded. “That’d be good. The department here ought to give you one, but it could take a while. Knowing them, the best thing would be to wait until someone quits or retires, and grab theirs before anyone notices.”

By the time Lorelei came out of Simon’s office, Blair was at Rafe’s desk, starting up the program he wanted. “Blair,” she said in a syrupy voice, “what are you doing?”

Sandburg glanced up at her. “Working.”

She leaned over his shoulder. “On what?”

Blair ducked. “Step away from my Guide,” Jim said. “Now.”

Lorelei stayed right where she was, long enough for Jim to seriously consider pulling her away bodily. Finally, she stepped away. 

“Thank you,” Jim said flatly. “Okay, Chief?”

“Okay,” Blair said. 

Jim started working his way through a stack of unsolved robbery cases, looking for others that fit the pattern of the series they were investigating. He didn’t get very far before Lorelei sat down across from him and cleared her throat. “I take it Blair began work a little earlier than planned?”

Jim glanced up at her. “Yeah, I needed him on a case.”

“And has he been displaying this surly and uncooperative attitude the whole time?”

“Excuse me?”

She repeated herself.

“I heard you; I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lorelei referred to her clipboard. “First, he used language that is not appropriate for the workplace.”

“You realize this is a police station, right?”

“Then he talked back to you when you corrected him.”

“When was that?”

Lorelei read from her clipboard, “You said, quote, ‘You probably shouldn’t have tried to carry two at once,’ and he said, quote, ‘No shit.’”

“Well, it was pretty obvious.”

“Also, he refused to answer my direct question about what he was doing.”

“He answered you. Are you _looking_ for things to complain about?”

“Detective Ellison, small problems like this can quickly turn into something much bigger.”

“You haven’t actually mentioned a problem yet,” Jim pointed out. “If you don’t mind, I’m working here.”

Lorelei made another note on her clipboard. 

After about an hour, Blair logged off of Rafe’s computer and came back to his desk. “Hey,” he said quietly, putting some printouts on Jim’s desk. He gave the G-TAC woman a wary look before sitting down. “I didn’t find much—the Haworths’ water-delivery guy did time in Walla-Walla, and so did the Carrells’ cleaning lady’s brother.”

“Not exactly a smoking gun, there, Chief,” Jim noted. 

“Yeah—that’s the best I found, though.”

“I’m not getting anywhere here, either. All right, let’s go.” Jim got their coats and held Blair’s out for him to put on.

“I can do it myself now, remember?” he asked, taking the jacket from Jim and putting it on.

“Oh, yeah.” Jim patted his shoulder. 

As they headed for the door, Lorelei got up and started following them. 

“No,” Jim said.

“Pardon me?”

“No.”

“I heard you,” she said with a completely unfriendly smile. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“We’re interviewing witnesses. It’s not a spectator sport.” 

“I see. When can I expect you to return?”

“When you see us.” 

“Very well. I’ll just interview some of your…colleagues.”

“You do that.”

Once they put some distance between themselves and the G-TAC representative, Jim felt himself beginning to relax. Blair seemed to be settling down, too, the reek of anxiety that hung around him easing off. “You okay?” Blair asked.

Jim nodded. “She’s up to something.”

Sandburg didn’t have to ask who he meant. “Yeah?”

“She had something to say about just about every word that came out of your mouth.”

“I don’t know what she can do about it, if you don’t have any complaints,” Blair said doubtfully. “I mean, I’m _your_ Guide. You pretty much get to make the rules.” 

He shook his head. “I hope you’re right.” He was growing more and more sure, though, that Lorelei wouldn’t be hanging around if she didn’t have something up her sleeve.

#

As Lorelei interviewed the Major Crimes detectives, her frustration mounted. No one had so much as a bad word to say about Sandburg. She struggled to find creative ways to put the praise they heaped onto him in her report. “Shows initiative,” for example, she wrote down as, “frequently oversteps orders.” 

“We’ve all been more productive since he showed up,” Detective Brown told her. “He’s great on the computer. Last week he spent most of a day helping me run database searches.” 

The tip of Lorelei’s pen hovered over the form for a moment. Finally, with a twist of satisfaction, she wrote “Ignores his Sentinel’s needs to socialize with other members of work group.”

After she’d made the rounds of the entire department, Lorelei settled down at Detective Ellison’s desk to see what she could “accidentally” notice. Most of what she saw was useless for her purposes—case reports, a few news clippings about Ellison’s exploits, a creased photograph of a woman, half-hidden by the desk blotter. 

After searching the desk, she noticed Sandburg’s little knapsack tucked under his chair. Ducking down so that the detectives in the room wouldn’t notice what she was doing, she quickly rummaged through it. She found a pair of socks, a bottle of water, granola bars, and—an application to Rainer University, filled out in Sandburg’s name. 

Jackpot.

#

They stayed out interviewing witnesses and pawnshop owners until the end of the work day. Blair knew Jim was keeping them out of the station on purpose—the work they were doing was hardly more than busywork, treading over ground they had already covered last week. 

“Do you have a plan for if she shows up again tomorrow?” he wondered as they went back up to Major Crimes to sign out. 

“I’ll think of something. Maybe ask Ramirez if he could use a hand on that surveillance operation he’s doing down at the docks.”

“You think she’ll blink first, if we just keep avoiding her?”

“She almost has to. We can’t be the only people on her caseload. She’ll have to give up and bother someone else eventually.”

“I hope so.” Blair was less confident about that than Jim was—in his experience, G-TAC seemed willing to devote as much manpower as it took to the project of making his life miserable. 

Marks, the G-TAC woman, was sitting at Jim’s desk when they arrived. Blair gulped and resisted the impulse to duck behind Jim for protection. She couldn’t do anything to him in the middle of the police station, and anyway, Jim would protect him whether Blair was standing behind him or not.

“Detective Ellison, good afternoon,” she said.

Wordlessly, Jim nodded at her. Noticing his knapsack on the desk—not where he’d left it—Blair reached for it. 

Ms. Marks brought one hand down on top of it. “Is this yours, Blair?”

“Yes,” he said cautiously. 

She smiled, a satisfied little smirk. “Why don’t you go get us a cup of coffee, Blair, while I talk to your Sentinel. Black with two sugars, please.” Baring her teeth slightly, she added, “Be careful!”

It was obvious Marks wanted to put him in his place more than she wanted to talk to Jim alone. Blair hated to give her the satisfaction. In the old days, he wouldn’t have hesitated to tell her where to get off and take his lumps, but he had a lot more to lose now. 

Before he could decide what to do, Jim said, “No. If you want coffee, you can help yourself—on your way out.” 

Marks smiled tightly. “Very well.” She opened Blair’s knapsack and took out his Rainer application. “Detective Ellison, were you aware that your Guide is evidently planning to--” she gave that little smirk again “—enroll in college?”

Shit. He really should have taken his bag with him.

“Yes.” 

Marks blinked. “And you intend to tolerate this?”

“I intend to encourage it,” Jim corrected her.

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think that’s wise, Detective. Are you aware that Sandburg used his contacts at the University to evade the draft eight years ago?”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.” 

“And you aren’t at all…concerned…about what he might do if he’s allowed back into that environment?”

“No.” 

Marks bared her teeth again. “I see. Well, even if you aren’t concerned, offering such a significant privilege on the basis of a few weeks’ acceptable behavior is a bit _premature_ , don’t you think?”

Jim glanced over at him, silently asking how he was doing. Blair nodded back slightly. It was clear that Ms. Marks was baying up the wrong tree, if she thought any of this was going to make an impression on Jim. “Clearly you think so,” Jim said.

“I do. It would be much better to wait, oh, at least a year. If this is something your Guide really wants to do, deferring it will be an ideal way to motivate him to continue to behave himself.”

“If I were trying to use it as a weapon against him, yes, that’s probably what I’d do,” Jim agreed.

Marks’s hesitation showed that she had once again not gotten the response she expected. “What is it that you’re trying to accomplish, exactly?”

“Me? Nothing. Sandburg wants to accomplish finishing his degree.”

“Detective Ellison, there is no reason that a Guide needs a degree in--” she glanced down at the application “—anthropology. I’m afraid I can’t approve of this.”

“Then don’t,” Jim suggested. “The regs say that he needs the authorization of his G-TAC caseworker, _or_ his Sentinel, _or_ his immediate supervisor. One of them, not all three.” 

“You indicated that you would cooperate with Guide Sandburg’s ongoing training,” Lorelei reminded him. “I wouldn’t describe your current attitude as cooperation, myself.”

“I indicated that I’d cooperate with necessary training,” Jim corrected her. “I have no complaints about Sandburg’s performance, Captain Banks has no complaints about his behavior, and he knows more about Sentinels and Guides than most of my instructors at OCS and the Academy. He doesn’t need any more…training.”

“I beg to differ.” Marks smiled triumphantly as she stood up and came around the desk. “After I submit my report to the director, I’m sure he’ll agree that Sandburg needs to be brought in for some additional training sessions. Have a nice day, Detective, Guide.”

Blair’s stomach churned with acid, and his heart hammered in his chest. “Oh, shit. Jim, I can’t….”

Jim guided him around to his chair. “Don’t worry. We’re going to—do something. I’ll write my own report, and we’ll have Simon do one, too.”

“That’s not gonna help.”

“It has to,” Jim argued. “She’s completely off-base. You’re doing fine.”

“I know that, and you know that, but she doesn’t know that.”

“Anyway, we’re Bonded. They can’t separate us. Anything they want to do, they’d have to get past me first.”

Blair shook his head. Jim was so naïve. He scrambled in the desk drawer for the thick volume of G-TAC regs they’d acquired a few weeks ago. After looking in the index, he found the page he wanted. “Here. ‘Bonded pairs shall not be separated except for training sessions less than 24 hours in duration. At least 48 hours shall be allotted for recovery between such sessions.’”

Jim took over the book. “‘Sessions shall be terminated at the first sign of any danger to either Sentinel or Guide.’ As far as I’m concerned, you being out of my sight anywhere near G-TAC is a sign of danger.”

“I don’t think they’ll read it that way.” 

“I don’t care how they read it. They aren’t getting you, period.”

Blair tried to be reassured by that. “Thanks, Jim. Can we go home?”

“Sure. Just let me talk to Simon, and we’ll get out of here.” Jim squeezed his shoulder. “Nothing to worry about.”

Blair wished he was as confident of that as Jim was.

#

“Ang, can you get that? I’m up to my elbow in fish here,” Kas called from the kitchen. 

With his hearing turned down to focus on the journal article he was reading, Temas hadn’t heard the phone. “Sure,” he called back, picking up the cordless on his desk. “Hello, Temas residence, Angel speaking.”

“Dr. Temas. Jim Ellison.”

Oh, fuck. He had a feeling Jim hadn’t called just to chat. “Hi Jim,” he said, getting up and heading toward the kitchen. “What’s up?”

“We’re having a little bit of a problem here. Sandburg said we should call you. I don’t know what you can do, really.” 

In the background, Angel heard Blair said, “Just tell him what happened, Jim.”

It couldn’t be too bad, then. “If we can do anything, we’d be glad to help.” Reaching the kitchen, he caught Kas’s eye and mouthed, _Jim and Blair_. 

Kas abandoned the dinner preparations and quickly washed his hands. Drying them on a towel, he stepped over to Angel’s side. Angel angled the phone so that Kas could hear.

“Our G-TAC caseworker came to observe us at work today,” Jim explained. “She didn’t like what she saw, and now she wants to take Blair in for—additional ‘training sessions.’”

“You can’t let her do that,” Angel said. 

“Yeah, we got that far,” Jim answered. “The part we’re having trouble with is how to stop her. I think if we just refuse, they’ll back down, but Blair’s pretty freaked.”

Blair seized the phone. “They aren’t going to just _back down_. I know these people.”

“You definitely need a plan B,” Kas agreed. 

“Let’s meet up and talk about this,” Angel suggested. “You can come here, or we can come there.”

“There,” Blair said. “They know where we live.”

“Chief, they aren’t going to knock the door down,” Jim told him. “We don’t want to bother you at home,” he said into the phone.

“I know,” Blair said in the background. “But I’d feel better if we’re not here.”

“She has to talk to her supervisor, anyway,” Jim added. “It’ll be at least tomorrow, and that’s only if they’re the most efficient government organization in the world.”

“I said I know,” Blair repeated. “But I’d still feel better if we’re not here.”

“It’s fine,” Angel cut in. “Kas has dinner just about ready to go in the oven anyway, and there’s plenty,” he added, eyeing the enormous trout on the sideboard. “So that’s just as good for us.”

“If you’re sure it’s not any trouble,” Jim said. 

“No trouble at all.” Angel gave him their address. 

“Thanks,” Blair said. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Okay. We’ll leave the porch light on.” 

Putting the phone down, Angel went to the refrigerator. “What are we having with this fish? Salad?”

“Sure. And rice, I think.”

Angel started taking out salad ingredients. “How worried do you think we ought to be?”

“I’m not sure,” Kas admitted, coating the fish with olive oil. “I mean, it’s no wonder Blair’s afraid, but I’m not sure they’ll really get that far out of hand now that he has a Sentinel looking out for him. Even if they do take him in for training, they have to know that if they hurt him too badly, it’s going to compromise Ellison’s effectiveness.”

“And that Ellison will probably kill them,” Angel pointed out.

“That, too.”

#

“You all right, Chief?”

Sandburg nodded, his rapid heartbeat and shallow breathing telling Jim that he was not really okay at all.

“I’m not going to let them hurt you,” Jim said. “That’s just not happening, so don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t think you realize how much they don’t care what you want,” Blair answered. 

Jim avoided having to answer by saying, “Watch for the turnoff on that side; I don’t want to miss it and have to find someplace to turn around.” Temas and Kas lived on the outskirts of Cascade, halfway up a narrow, twisting mountain road. They had already had one hair-raising experience when they’d come around a switchback and found themselves face-to-face with an SUV whose driver clearly believed in taking his half out of the middle of the road. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, Chief,” Jim tried again. “We just have to show them we’re not going to take any of their crap, that’s all.”

“Yeah. I’ve kind of tried that, Jim, and it hasn’t worked out that great.”

“Yes,” Jim said, “but you’re not a Sentinel.” Sentinels could go toe-to-toe with G-TAC and have a decent chance of getting their own way. He’d seen it happen. The Temases’ mailbox was half-hidden behind a boulder; Jim didn’t notice it until they were almost past it. Slamming on the brakes, he made a sharp turn into an unpaved driveway. 

After jouncing up the drive for almost a mile, the truck’s wheels suddenly hit pavement and they emerged into a clearing dominated by a large A-framed house, with a front wall that seemed to be made entirely of windows. Jim parked over by a detached two-car garage. “Nice place they have here,” Blair remarked as they got out of the car. 

“It’s not bad,” Jim agreed. That driveway looked like the only point of access, too, and it would be as defensible as hell. Roll some of those decorative boulders in front of it, and the only way to get in would be either C-4 or a helicopter, neither of which would exactly be inconspicuous.

It was only when he noticed himself noticing that, that Jim realized he might be a little more spooked than he was admitting. Tucking Blair under his arm, they headed for the front door.

Dr. Temas answered the door. “Hi, guys. Are you okay?” he asked, ushering them inside.

Jim glanced at Blair and nodded. “Thanks. I’m sorry we had to bother you at home.”

Temas made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t worry about it. C’mon, Kas is back this way.” He led them to a large, open kitchen with gleaming, stainless-steel appliances. “I thought we’d eat first,” Temas continued, “then talk. Does that sound okay?”

Jim and Blair agreed. Kas opened the oven and slid out a very large fish, which had been roasted whole with the skin and head on. The air was fragrant with herbs—thyme, parsley, maybe rosemary. “Ang, you want to get the--”

“Got it.” Temas held out a large platter that was also shaped like a fish. When Kas slid the fish from the baking pan to the platter, Temas held it up and said, “Congratulations—it’s a bouncing baby fish.”

Kas glanced over at them. “He says that _every time_. You want to put that on the table, funny guy?”

“Sure.” 

In a few minutes, they had the meal on the table. Temas uncorked a bottle of wine and poured, then served the fish while Kas served the rice and salad. 

When they started eating, Blair used his left hand to arrange the fingers of his right around the fork. Jim caught Dr. Temas’s eye and glanced over at Blair. Temas watched what Blair was doing and nodded back at him. 

After awkwardly conveying a few bites to his mouth, Blair said, “Everything’s really good, Kas.”

“Yeah,” Jim added. “This is a good fish.”

“I caught it up at our cottage last summer,” Kas said. “They’re even better fresh.”

“Oh, you fish?”

Kas nodded. “Dry flies, yeah. You?”

“Yeah, I love fishing. You ever go up to that trout stream that runs through the state game lands?”

“I have, but I think catch and release is sort of pointless. I mean, I’ll go, but if I have time I’d rather go up to the cottage catch something we can eat. We have about two miles of the clearest trout stream you’ve ever seen. You guys should come with us sometime,” he added.

“Good idea,” Temas said. “I’ll lie in the hammock and read while you guys stand up to your asses in freezing cold water.”

“Sounds nice,” Jim agreed.

“It’s great,” Kas said. “It’s an old family place, but my parents are too old to make it up there, and my sister hates it, so it’s ours whenever we want it.”

“Make sure you tell them the downside before you invite them,” Temas warned. “The place is only about fifty miles away, but the last eight you have to leave the car and take these ATVs up to the cottages. And you have to make about five trips with all of your gear.”

“You don’t know how good you have it,” Kas said. “When I was a kid, we had to hike up, or else take mules. The mules can carry more, but then you had to feed them and clean up after them.”

“And they kick you,” Temas said.

“That only happened the one time.”

“That’s because we got the ATVs after that.”

“It has running water now, too,” Kas added. “Getting the pump, water heater, and generator up there on muleback was a real pain in the ass, but Ang insisted on it.”

“If my grandparents wanted me to live somewhere without indoor plumbing, they wouldn’t have come to the US in the first place.”

“It’s called camping, you big baby.”

“Moving to Florida in a rowboat was enough roughing it to last my family for at least five generations.” Temas picked up the serving fork. “It’s worth it for the fish, though. As long as I don’t have to catch them. Anybody else want seconds?”

Everybody asked for some. 

After they’d made a start on their second helpings, Kas asked Blair, “Other than the obvious, how’s it going?”

Blair glanced over at Jim. “Okay.”

“Maybe you should tell them about that thing last night, Chief,” Jim suggested.

“What thing?” Temas asked.

“It was nothing,” Blair said. “Stomach flu or something.”

“I don’t think so,” Jim disagreed. He described Sandburg’s episode from the night before.

“That sounds like a panic attack,” Temas said when he had finished. 

“Why would I have a panic attack when everything was fine?” Blair asked. “You’d think I’d have had one today, when that G-TAC woman showed up.”

“Well,” Temas said slowly, “it could be that you’ve habituated to high stress levels, and your physiological reactions are all out of whack. My guess would be that last night your subconscious decided it was safe to, well, freak the fuck out. Your casts coming off could have been a trigger.”

“If that’s it, I don’t have to worry about having another one any time soon,” Blair said.

“Maybe not,” Temas agreed. “If it keeps happening, I can prescribe something, or give you a psych referral.” 

“Okay,” Blair said, nodding. “It was kind of scary.”

“I’m sure it was,” Temas answered. “How long did the whole episode last?”

Blair glanced over at him, shrugging.

“Maybe half an hour,” Jim said. 

“That’s on the long side, but not all that unusual.”

“I used to have panic attacks as a kid, actually,” Blair said suddenly. “I forgot about it. They stopped when I was about twelve.”

“That’s probably it, then.”

When they had finished dinner, Angel made a pot of coffee and they re-settled in the living room. “All right,” Temas said. “What happened today? Start at the beginning.”

Jim started, but didn’t get very far before Temas interrupted, “She just showed up? They reviewed us all the time when I was in medical school, and then when we left the service, but we always got at least 48 hours notice.”

“They’re not playing fair at all,” Jim agreed. “That’s just the beginning.” He went on to explain the specific criticisms Lorelei had leveled against Blair.

“I’m glad she’s not our caseworker,” Kas said. “If she thinks you shouldn’t say ‘shit’ in a police station, she’d have a real problem with him saying ‘fuck’ every other word in a hospital.”

“Yeah, really,” Angel said. “Okay, the first thing you need to do is ask for a copy of her report, then write up a rebuttal, and send it straight to the director.” 

“I was going to send something in,” Jim said. “Do they have to give me a copy of the report if I ask for one?”

“I always ask for ours,” Angel said with a shrug. “They’ve never said no.”

“Jim’s captain is going to write up a report, too,” Blair put in. “He knows about the—you know, stuff—and he was pretty pissed off about it. He’s on our side.”

“He’s genuinely impressed with Sandburg’s work, too,” Jim added. “It’s not like he has to lie.”

“Good,” Temas said. “That should help. If you’re doing well on the job, everything else is pretty much a matter of style.”

“What about Stoddard, from Rainier?” Jim asked Blair. “I bet he’d write something.”

“He would,” Blair said, “but the kind of things he’d say might be the opposite of what they want to hear. I don’t think they’ll be impressed by my groundbreaking research demonstrating that they’re completely wrong about everything.” 

“Yeah,” Jim realized. “Good point.”

“What kind of research?” Temas asked.

“I’m an anthropologist,” Blair said, a little defensively. “BS Rainier and the University of Barcelona, MA University of Barcelona. I started my PhD at Barcelona, and I’m going to finish it at Rainier.” 

“Oh,” Temas said. “Have you told G-TAC about that yet? Because if not, I think it’s a case of what they don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “I didn’t get to that part yet. We went out to do some witness interviews, and when we got back, she’d searched his bag and found the application.”

“Fuck,” Temas said.

“Yep,” Blair agreed. “Jim was pretty awesome—she asked if he knew about it, like she thought I somehow managed to get the whole thing in motion when I had casts on both hands. He said how it was his idea for me to do it.”

“And that’s pretty much when she started making threats about taking him in for training,” Jim added. “So maybe I should have been less awesome.”

“Maybe,” Angel agreed. “As you might imagine, they aren’t crazy about how Kas and I get along—we’ve had a lot of success just pretending to agree with whatever they say and then not doing it.”

“It helps that they haven’t been paying much attention, though,” Kas pointed out. 

“Not for the last fifteen years or so, yeah,” Temas said. “But they kept pretty close tabs on us in med school and when we first got out of the service.”

“And when I was in the Rangers,” Kas added. “They were just waiting for us to fail, and that wasn’t fun at all, but we got good enough results that they pretty much had to leave us alone and pretend it had all been their idea in the first place.”

“We’ll write to the director, too,” Angel said. “The SRB calls me for advice now when they have a Sentinel who wants to go into medicine, so I think our days as troublemakers are far enough in the past that it’ll help more than it hurts.”

“Cool,” Blair said. “Thanks.”

“So that’s plan A,” Kas summed up. “Show them a mountain of evidence that whatever problems they think you’re having are completely imaginary.”

Blair nodded. “Okay. What are we going to do when that doesn’t work?”

“It might work,” Temas said. 

“If they do call you in for training, you could try to stall,” Kas answered. “If you could get your captain to say he can’t spare the two of you, that would buy you some time. But I wouldn’t bank on them giving up and going away, so eventually you’d have to either go or flee the country.”

“I don’t like either of those options,” Jim said. 

“Getting out of the country would be a lot harder than it was the first time,” Blair commented. “I’m sure I’m on some kind of no-fly list now.”

“There are hundreds of miles of unsecured border a couple of hours’ drive north,” Kas pointed out. 

“Canada extradites draft resisters to the US,” Blair said. “But if we got on a plane to somewhere else as soon as we got there, that might work.”

“That’s pretty drastic,” Temas pointed out. “We might want to call that Plan C.”

“Then what’s plan B?” Blair asked.

“Well—plan B would be the stalling thing, so I guess Canada is plan D,” Temas hesitated.

“What’s plan C?” Jim asked, sensing that he already knew the answer and didn’t like it.

Temas moved closer to Kas on the loveseat they were sharing, and said, “Well, that would be for him to go in for the training.”

“No,” Jim growled. “That’s plan ‘over my dead body.”

“Here’s the thing,” Angel said. “Going over his Sentinel’s head to discipline him is crossing a serious line, one that I don’t think any Sentinel in the country would want to see crossed. G-TAC beating up an un-Bonded Guide is one thing, but having Jim in the picture changes things. Even the ones who think Blair needs a beating are going to think it’s Jim’s right to decide when and how to do it.”

Jim expected Blair to argue the point, but he nodded. “Yeah—I mean, it’s obvious that G-TAC and the SRB give Sentinels almost unlimited power over Guides as a distraction from how little control they have over their own lives. It’s one of the classic strategies of social dominance—if a man’s home is his castle, he’ll be so busy oppressing his wife and kids he won’t notice how often he’s getting fucked over by the people with real power. So how can we use that?”

“I don’t think we can use it yet,” Temas said. “Saying that we _think_ G-TAC _might_ cross that line isn’t going to have much of an effect. But if they actually do anything, and other Sentinels find out about it, I think G-TAC will get more of a reaction than they’re really prepared for.”

Kas added, “We lived in DC until a few years ago, so we know pretty much all of the Sentinels and Guides in the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Pentagon.”

“So I probably have about 200, maybe 250 Bonded pairs and a couple dozen singles in my address book,” Temas added. “And of course they all know more that I don’t know. I can only think of maybe—” He paused and counted on his fingers “—maybe ten or twelve Sentinels who would side with G-TAC on this one. Or less. Even the ones who beat up their own Guides might not like precedent of G-TAC stepping between a Sentinel and his own Guide.”

“Right,” Blair said, with just a hint of bitterness. “Spin it like it’s the camel’s nose in the tent—if G-TAC starts saying when you _can_ beat your Guide, they might start saying when you _can’t_. Who wants that?”

Temas nodded. “It’s ugly, but I think if we paint Jim as the real victim, G-TAC is going to wake up and find they’re out on a limb that’s cracking underneath them.”

Jim still didn’t like the sound of this plan. “Even if you’re right, there’s still one problem—the last time I left Blair alone in G-TAC, they broke five of his fingers.”

“He was already with you when they did that?” Kas asked.

“Yeah,” Jim said. “The right hand, they’d already done before I got there. Eventually they agreed I could take him, and I—well, I left him, for a few minutes, to do the paperwork. I’m sorry, Chief,” he added. “That woman promised nothing would happen to you. I shouldn’t have believed her.”

Blair nodded and shifted closer to him. “I wondered how that happened. I was pretty out of it.”

“You were unconscious—I didn’t want to move you twice. Obviously I should have.”

“It’s okay,” Blair said. “I know whose fault it really was.”

“That’s great, though,” Kas said. “I mean, it’s terrible, but it’s something we can use.”

Temas agreed, “It’s a little more of a gray area than if they did it now, but we can start getting the word to a few people we can count on to be outraged about it. G-TAC will have some excuse—”

“They’ll say the trainer had no idea he’d been chosen by a Sentinel,” Kas suggested. “Regrettable miscommunication in a tense situation, etc.”

“Something like that.” Temas nodded. “But if a few of our close personal friends—like the head of the President’s security detail and the assistant director of the FBI—express their concern, it should make them cautious.”

“What about Robert and Jean-Vincent?” Kas suggested.

“They’re the ambassadors from France,” Temas explained to Jim and Blair. “Yeah, them too—it might be a little dodgy for them to get involved in what’s clearly a domestic matter, but we should talk to them. They might have some ideas.”

“They might not be able to do anything officially, but they know lots of the higher-ups in European NGOs,” Kas added. “Not to mention the international press. The Sentinel-Guide draft is bad enough, but government-sanctioned assault with grievous bodily harm is going to make the US look bad in front of the other countries.”

Blair nodded. “I’m wondering about getting my mom’s activist and alternative press crowd in on this. I, uh, I didn’t actually tell her about my fingers,” he added to Jim. “Because I knew she’d flip out, and that might just make things worse. But if we’re going to start rocking the boat now….”

“I don’t know how much G-TAC will care about what draft protestors think,” Temas pointed out. “But in this case…yeah, if they get the idea that anything that happens to him isn’t going to be kept a secret, I don’t see how that can hurt.”

“Okay,” Blair said. “I mean, I think this is the way to go. If we leave the country, we’re on the run forever. I know you don’t want that,” he added to Jim.

“I’m not wild about the idea,” Jim admitted. “But if it comes down to it, that’s what we’ll do.” It was something he wouldn’t have even considered before Blair came into his life, but…things were different now. 

“All right,” Temas said. “Let’s figure out who’s doing what, and when. We don’t want to break out the big guns until we know we have to. Now that I think about it, I wonder if we should hold the French diplomatic corps in reserve—we don’t want to give G-TAC an excuse to start throwing around ugly words like ‘sedition.’”

“You have a point,” Kas agreed. “I know they can be discreet, but starting small gives us room to maneuver. What about the hippies? Are you going to bring them in right away, Blair, or wait and see?”

Blair considered. “Let’s wait. I don’t want to get my mom in trouble unless I have to.”

Angel nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll call a few people tonight—well,” he added, glancing at his watch, “it’s pretty late on the east coast. First thing in the morning. I’ll tell them to keep everything low-key; just call the G-TAC office here and express concerns about a regrettable incident. And Kas and I will write up something to send to the local office tomorrow, along with the ones from Jim and your captain. Then we’ll see what G-TAC does next. If they don’t back down, we’ll bring in the French and the hippies and the whole rest of my address book. Everybody agree on the plan?”

“I’m in,” Kas said. 

Jim nodded. “Me, too. Chief? You’re the one taking the lion’s share of the risk here.”

“Sounds good,” Blair said. “Thanks, guys. I’m…really impressed. I mean, this isn’t your fight.”

“What’s the other option?” Angel asked. “Not doing anything?” His tone suggested that was a ridiculous idea. 

Jim remembered their first meeting in the hospital room, where Temas had stood up to a Sentinel twice his size. He was either very brave or very stupid. “We owe you one, Temas.”

#

“Lori, Lori, Lori,” Mr. Dench clucked as she sat down in his visitor’s chair. She hated his avuncular routine almost as much as she hated the way he could never remember that her name was _Lorelei_. “You’re your own worst critic, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry, sir?” she asked, smiling brightly.

He chuckled. She hated that too. “Why, if I went by your report, I’d think that your plan to match up Ellison and Sandburg was a miserable failure,” he explained, opening a folder and taking out her report, along with several others. “Fortunately, Ellison and his captain down at the police department have both written to me personally about the case. From their accounts, Ellison has managed to turn our little renegade into a solid citizen. Nice work.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, stalling for time. How could Mr. Dench have gotten such a disastrous impression? “But I think that Ellison is being overly optimistic. They’re clearly still in a honeymoon phase. Sandburg is superficially more cooperative, but only because Ellison is indulging him to a degree that I think is frankly dangerous.” 

Mr. Dench gave her a patronizing smile. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, Lori, and let me give you some advice: don’t borrow trouble. If Ellison’s indulgence starts affecting their work, we’ll hear about it—Captain Banks did indicate that he’s monitoring them closely. Until then, concentrate on your other cases,” he advised.

“Sir, did you see that he’s planning to let the Guide take classes at the University?” She had emphasized that in the report, but she had long suspected that Mr. Dench didn’t read past the first page.

“That is unwise,” Mr. Dench agreed. “Did you suggest that it would be better to wait until Sandburg has established compliant habits?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, struggling to keep her tone pleasant. “He indicated that he intends to proceed against my recommendation. The Guide seems to have manipulated him into believing that he’s an innocent victim.” Mr. Dench leafed through the pages of her report, and of the others. Across the desk and upside down, she couldn’t quite read them. What kind of lies had Ellison and Banks written? “I believe Captain Banks has fallen for his lies, too,” she added. 

“I can see why you’re concerned,” Mr. Dench finally agreed. “But this recommendation, that we bring him in for two weeks’ intensive training—you should know that we can’t do that to a Bonded pair.”

“They’re Bonded?” The words slipped out before she had a chance to stop them.

“Oh, yes. That part of your plan worked perfectly. Very good thing, Bonding often settles these difficult ones down. I agree,” he finally said, “that if Ellison is indulging him, that could lay the groundwork for problems later on. But such a prolonged separation—it’s not only against policy; it could also endanger them both. I’ll tell you what,” he proposed. “Let’s bring them in together for a training session one day next week. If we can elicit some of the same behavior from Sandburg—sorry, from Guide Ellison—that we saw when Sandburg was here, that should show Ellison why he needs to take a firmer hand.”

Lorelei struggled not to object. A single session, with both of them together, wouldn’t be nearly enough to teach them a lesson. 

“You haven’t worked with many newly-Bonded pairs, have you?” Mr. Dench asked kindly. “It’s absolutely essential to involve the Sentinel in any kind of training. Especially one as protective as Ellison. The first thing we’ll need to do is demonstrate to him that maintaining appropriate discipline is ultimately in his Guide’s best interest. Bonded Sentinels want their Guides to be happy; Ellison just needs to understand that spoiling him isn’t the way to achieve that. Then we’ll have the trainers show him some techniques to use at home. Then schedule another observation in a month or so—I’m sure you’ll see a tremendous improvement.”

“I’m sure you’re right, sir,” she simpered. If one session was all she was going to get, she had to make the most of it. “But Sentinel Ellison did indicate that he doesn’t plan to cooperate with future training.”

“I’ll contact him personally, and make it clear that compliance is not optional,” Mr. Dench said.

“Thank you, sir.” She had hoped to make the call herself, but the important thing was that it would be impressed upon Ellison that she had the right to demand his cooperation. “I’ll speak to the training staff about making a plan for their session,” she added, before Mr. Dench could take that away from her, too.

“Do that.” Mr. Dench passed back her report. “It’s obvious that you’ve been too hard on yourself here—while there are some potential problems with this pairing, they have every opportunity for a successful partnership. I’m going to give you the opportunity to revise your report in a way that reflects that, before I add it to their file.”

Through gritted teeth, Lorelei repeated, “Thank you, sir.”

#

Tuesday went by, and Wednesday, with no word from G-TAC. Blair was almost at the point of asking Jim to go ahead and call _them_ , just to end the suspense, when the call finally came in on Thursday morning. 

He knew it was G-TAC, just from the expression on Jim’s face when he answered the phone. Jim mouthing, “ _It’s them_ ” and motioning him over to listen in just confirmed what he already knew.

“Fine, thanks,” Jim was saying.

“I’m glad to hear that, Detective Ellison,” an unfamiliar man’s voice said. “Now, these reports from Miss Marks’s observation earlier this week look quite promising.”

They did? Blair glanced over at Jim. 

“Miss Marks has some concerns, but she’s young, and perhaps a bit overzealous.” The man chuckled. “I’m sorry if her initial feedback alarmed you. She’s anxious to do a good job, to make her mark, so to speak.” He laughed again. Jim didn’t. “At any rate, we do think it would be beneficial for you and your Guide to come in for a training session one day next week.”

“Both of us?” Jim asked sharply. 

“Yes, both of you. It does appear that you’re doing quite well with him—your captain is certainly pleased—but there might be a few areas where he could use some fine-tuning, shall we say?”

“I don’t think he needs any fine-tuning,” Jim answered. 

“Nevertheless,” the man said, a firmer note coming into his genial voice. “We’d like to schedule a session. I can speak to your captain about it, if you like. Which day next week would work for you?”

Blair reached for Jim’s appointment calendar. They had agreed that they were doing this, and having Jim there with him was more than they had hoped for. Now he just had to be brave.

Unclenching his jaw, Jim said, “If we come, I’m not letting him out of my sight, not even for a second. And no one touches him but me.”

“All right,” the man said after a moment. “I can promise you that, if it would make you more comfortable. We do regret the, ah, unfortunate incident the day you acquired him. The trainer was unaware that he’d been promised to you.”

Kas had nailed it in one. Blair turned to the calendar. He was tempted to say Friday—put it off as long as possible—but he might be better off not giving himself too much time to get worked up about it. And if they went on Friday, G-TAC could find some excuse to hang on to them for the entire weekend, without anyone really noticing. 

Jim had a court appearance on Tuesday morning. He pointed to it.

Jim nodded. “Fine. We can manage Monday. We have to be in court first thing Tuesday, so we have to be home at a reasonable hour.”

“Come at eight, and we’ll have you out of here by four-thirty,” the man said. “Thank you for your cooperation, Detective.”

“I want that in writing,” Jim said. “We’re there from eight to four-thirty, we aren’t separated, and nobody touches him.”

The man hesitated, then said, “Certainly. I’ll write up a memo covering what we’ve discussed, and fax you a copy.”

“You do that.”

“And we’ll look forward to seeing you Monday morning.”

Jim hung up. “I don’t like this one bit, Chief.”

“Neither do I,” Blair said. “But I don’t like it a hell of a lot less if you’re going to be there.” He hesitated. “You’re taking your gun, right?”

“I think I’m taking two of them,” Jim answered. “If we have to shoot our way out, we’re pretty fucked, though.” 

“We’ll probably be okay,” Blair said, hoping to convince himself. “If we play along, like Angel was saying.”

“Yeah—I know that’s not your style,” Jim said apologetically.

“It’s different, when it’s not my whole life.” He’d done it before, cooperated for a little while to buy himself a little time to recover. And Jim would be there. That made a difference. “Let’s get back to work, okay?”

“Sure,” Jim agreed. “Let’s go over the forensics on that assault—we should try to interview the victim again this afternoon, when she’ll be awake.”

Blair threw himself into the distraction, managing to forget about the upcoming ordeal for minutes at a time. But by the time they were heading home, he had nothing else to think about. Before long he found himself concocting lurid scenarios—Jim being hit with a tranquilizer dart as soon as they walked in the door, and faceless goons ripping him away from Jim’s side to throw him back into the nightmare.

Taking one hand off the steering wheel, Jim reached over and squeezed his shoulder. Blair patted Jim’s hand gratefully. “We should tell Temas and Kas what’s happening,” Jim said. “Let them know to start making waves if we’re not back on schedule.”

Blair wanted to say that it was a good idea, but instead snapped, “Temas is his last name, too, you know.”

“Kas, you mean?” Jim asked mildly. 

“Yeah. Him.” That was exactly the kind of shit he had to _not_ say when they were in the belly of the beast. 

“We should tell Angel and Kas,” Jim corrected himself. “Okay?”

“Yeah.”

Stopping at a red light, Jim reached over and unfastened Blair’s seatbelt. He slid over next to Jim and had the middle belt buckled before the light changed. Leaning up against Jim, he felt a little better, a little more secure. It might only be an illusion of safety, but it helped. 

“So what do you think we can expect on Monday?” Jim asked, tucking Blair up against his side.

“I really don’t know,” Blair finally said. “What they usually do is start by giving me stupid orders until I give them an excuse to start the beatings.”

“What kind of stupid orders?”

Blair really didn’t want to talk about the details—it was obvious that the entire purpose of the “training” was to dehumanize him, to degrade him with a demonstration of the trainers’ unlimited power. He knew Jim well enough to know he wouldn’t think any less of him because of what he’d been through, but he couldn’t see a way to paint a picture of the training without also calling up its power to humiliate. 

On the other hand, if they were going to develop a strategy, Jim had to have as much information as he did about what they might be walking into. “Stupid stuff. Kneel, put your hands on your head, sit, stay, come—basic German Shepherd crap. And yeah,” he added, anticipating Jim’s next question, “I did try just doing it. But the point isn’t to make me do it, it’s to prove that they can make me do it. So they just keep going until they get to something I can’t swallow. And then they come up with something worse for the next day.”

“I really don’t want to know how bad it got, do I?” Jim asked.

“No, you don’t. But if the Rangers taught you anything about withstanding torture, you probably already have some ideas.”

Jim shuddered.

“Yeah. I took enough psychology classes that I knew what they were trying to do. I don’t think it helped,” he added. 

“The idea behind the Ranger training is that if the enemy gets you, you won’t break,” Jim said. “Not giving up any information is the top priority; surviving is second.”

“Oh, right. Then yeah, it helped. In a completely not-helpful way. With G-TAC, there’s no information they care about; the whole point is to induce Stockholm Syndrome, and it doesn’t work all that well if you understand the process.” 

It had worked, actually, but it hadn’t _lasted_. Eventually, when he couldn’t stand any more of what the trainers were throwing at him, he’d manage to dissociate himself from what he was being made to do, and bury any signs of resistance so deeply the trainers couldn’t see them. At that point they’d reward him by not hurting him anymore, and eventually by returning a little of his personal dignity. And he’d been pathetically, genuinely grateful for it—for a little while. Eventually he’d be placed out with a Sentinel, and once his world expanded to just a little more than a trainer and a cell, his gratitude would crumble and be replaced by resentment. Before long, the Sentinel would return him to G-TAC and the cycle would start over.

“Okay,” Jim said. “So we’ll play along for the bullshit stuff, the German Shepherd stuff.” Blair nodded. “But when you want out, give me a sign, and I’ll make up some reason I don’t want you to do it, whatever it is.” 

“You could tell them that you don’t want me taking orders from anyone other than you,” Blair suggested. It would be less humiliating, somehow, to do tricks for Jim, when they both knew it didn’t mean anything. “Tell them they have to pass everything through you.”

“We can do that,” Jim agreed. 

“What are you going to do when they tell you to hit me?” Blair asked.

“That’s where I draw the line on this playing along thing,” Jim answered. “I’m not hurting you.”

“Fine with me,” Blair agreed, gratefully. He had been wondering whether he should agree to go as far as a slap or two, but he certainly wasn’t going to try to talk Jim into it. “Maybe you should have an explanation ready for why you won’t do it.”

“‘Hell no’ isn’t enough?” Jim thought. “All right, how about I just point out it’s bad strategy to keep doing the same thing that they’ve already seen doesn’t work?”

“I actually told them that once,” Blair said, remembering. It had been right after the first Sentinel they’d assigned him to sent him back. He’d been genuinely surprised to see that G-TAC didn’t have anything new to try. “But it might go over a little better coming from you.”

“Only you, Chief,” Jim said, shaking his head. 

#

“You want to paint the walls, Chief?” Jim asked, as they passed the paint display in the home improvement center. 

“Nah,” Blair said. “The smell of the paint will drive you crazy for a week. I’ll just hang up some pictures or something. Oh, hey, maybe one of those shadowbox things they have over by the storage solutions, the ones with all the little compartments. I could put my--” He stopped. “Stuff that I don’t have any more. Never mind. Pictures are good.”

Jim nodded. They had decided to devote the weekend to fixing up Blair’s room. The project gave them something to focus on, and also, Jim hoped, would serve to remind both of them that their partnership was permanent, and the loft was Blair’s home as much as it was Jim’s. “Okay, where should we go for pictures?”

“The flea market, I guess,” Blair decided. “They sometimes have cool stuff there. Damn, we should have gone there first,” he added, tapping the flat-pack bookcase that was in their cart. “We might find a nicer shelf than this one.”

“No reason you can’t have two,” Jim said. “Or we can bring this one back, if you decide you don’t want it before we get it out of the box.”

“Okay. Let’s head over there—they start leaving around two. Used to, anyway.”

“I think they still do,” Jim agreed. 

The flea market was set up in a cavernous old Quonset hut on the outskirts of the city. Jim had always found it hard to stomach—sound echoed dizzyingly off the metal roof and walls, and the tables and stands selling everything from used clothing and furniture, to hot dogs and popcorn, to the occasional snake or litter of kittens, created both visual and olfactory chaos. But with Blair by his side, he found it easy to tune out the extraneous sensory input.

The first thing they did was buy a couple of hot dogs—Blair had gotten his first paycheck the day before, and insisted on paying for them—and then they began strolling through the narrow aisles. Jim’s initial impression was that none of the vendors were selling anything he’d have in his home if they paid him, but Blair had an uncanny way of diving into a cardboard box full of warped Tupperware lids, under a table full of Avon perfume bottles or rusty tools, and coming out with a treasure—or what Blair insisted was a treasure, anyway. 

“This is a reproduction, but it’s a pretty good one,” he’d say, holding up a carved African mask. “And look, they only want ten dollars for it!”

They didn’t find any bookshelves, but Blair did dig through every box of Harlequin romances or stack of moldy magazines they came across, and found plenty of things to put on the shelves they’d already bought. 

“Oh, man, I have to have this,” he said, pouncing on a book titled _The Raw and the Cooked_.

“Some kind of natural foods thing?” Jim hazarded.

Blair gave him a surprised look. “No—it’s Levi-Strauss, he’s an anthropologist, hugely influential in both theory and practice. He basically founded the structuralist school. I’m more of a post-structuralist myself, but of course you can’t get to the ‘post’ without the ‘pre,’ can you?” 

“Haven’t you already read it, Chief?” Jim asked.

“Of course I have.” Blair hugged the book to his chest. “But everyone should have it, and it’s only a quarter.”

Jim held up his hands. “I’m not arguing with you. Get it if you want it.”

“I do.” Blair dug in his pocket and handed the vendor a quarter.

Declining a bag, Jim tucked the book into one of the many bags he was already carrying. He was starting to feel like a pack mule; the next thing Blair bought, they were making a trip back to the truck to unload.

Their other great find was a desk, painted olive green with the previous owner’s name in a variety of fonts and several marijuana leaves inked onto the top. “This’ll be great once I sand all this paint off and refinish it,” Blair enthused. 

“That’s going to take forever,” Jim pointed out. “There are at least three layers of paint on there.”

“Not if we rent a power sander. I’ll do it out on the balcony,” he added. “Look at all these drawers.” He slid one in and out as if to illustrate his point. “And there’s plenty of room to spread out all my stuff. That’s really important, or I end up with piles of paper on the floor, and from there, madness.”

“The basement’s probably a better idea than the balcony,” Jim said. “It’ll take you at least a few days, and the balcony sometimes gets wet when it rains.”

“If I leave it in the basement, somebody might steal it.”

“Chief, nobody is going to steal that.” If Blair didn’t so obviously like it, Jim would have seriously considered paying $15—the asking price—to leave the desk where it was.

Instead, he made sure he was on the heavy side—the one with all the drawers—when they carried it out to the truck.

#

“I wrote up a summary of…everything,” Blair said, handing Kas a computer disk. “Just in case we disappear. And I had my mom set up an email account—the address is on the label. Send her the file, and she’ll know what to do with it.” He had thought about sending Naomi the file directly, but he wasn’t entirely sure that she’d be on board with suppressing it until G-TAC made their next move. 

“I really don’t think that’s going to happen,” Kas said, pocketing the disc.

“I know. Just in case, though.” 

“Yeah, good idea.” 

They had invited Kas and Angel over to the loft, ostensibly to go over some last-minute strategy, but mostly to keep him and Jim from going crazy with worry. 

“They had us come in for training together a bunch of times,” Angel said, accepting a beer from Jim and sitting on the couch. “It was a real pain in the ass, but it wasn’t scary. Mostly they just told me about all the things I ought to be doing to make sure Kas knew who was supposed to be in charge. I got a lot of practice saying, ‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ or ‘There’s an idea’ instead of ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’”

“Our guy asked a lot of questions about our sex life,” Kas added, taking a swig from his own beer. “That might have just been him, though.”

“Oh, yeah,” Angel said. “He always wanted to know if I ever let Kas ‘take the dominant role.’”

“The ‘active role,’” Kas corrected him. “That’s what he called it.”

“Right, that was it. The first time he asked about it I pretended I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.”

“‘You mean…standing up?’” Kas asked, imitating Angel’s light accent. 

“That was good for about twenty minutes of quality entertainment,” Angel added. “I was trying to see if I could get him to actually say, ‘Does he put his cock in your ass.’ He never did, but by the end he was drawing these fucking _diagrams_ …he must have thought I had no idea what sex even was.”

“Well, you only did know because I told you about it the week before,” Kas said seriously.

“I was vague on a couple of details,” Angel answered, laughing. “I had the basics down. God knows what he thought we were doing that I thought was sex. Arm wrestling, maybe, or anything. Needlepoint.”

“Taxidermy,” Kas suggested. 

“Mini-golf.”

As the suggestions got more and more outrageous, Blair found himself laughing too. Laughing at G-TAC was a new idea for him, but not a bad one. In the midst of his trials with G-TAC, there had been nothing to laugh about, but given just a little distance, humor had the power to cut oppression off at the knees, by denying the oppressor the right to define the terms of interaction. 

“Sorry,” Angel said, winding down. “This probably isn’t helping you.”

“No, it is,” Blair assured him. Angel had shown him how they could radically re-contextualize G-TAC’s methods simply by _not taking them seriously_. Tomorrow, he’d be playing the part of someone who had been successfully oppressed. Only he and Jim—and Kas and Angel, when they told them about it later—would understand what was really happening. The more convincing a performance he put on, the funnier it would be.

“Okay,” Angel said. “I don’t think they’d buy that answer from you guys, though. I was nineteen at the time.”

“No, it’s more of a general paradigm thing,” Blair agreed. 

“Any other questions we ought to be ready for?” Jim asked.

“That’s the only thing I really remember,” Angel said. “Kas?”

Kas closed his eyes, thinking. “When we were in medical school, they were really interested in who was doing the housework. The right answer was me, by the way.”

“I could have guessed that,” Jim said. “That reminds me, now that your hands are better, we’re taking turns with the cooking and cleaning up,” he added to Blair. 

“Cool,” Blair said. “If we’re doing one guy cooks and the other one cleans up, I have to remind you that calling for takeout is not cooking,” he added, gesturing at the Chinese food cartons on the table from their recently-finished dinner.

“I always clean up as I go along,” Jim said. “So that would get unfair fast. Let’s just do one day on, one day off.”

“Okay.” He was getting tired of the five or six things Jim liked to cook, anyway. He’d use his turns cooking to take the menu in some new, more interesting directions. “So whenever Jim’s not fucking me, he’s keeping me barefoot in the kitchen. What else?” 

“You never link up for non-work-related reasons,” Angel said. “That would be perverse and disgusting. You definitely never do it in bed.”

_You could do that?_ “Is that fun?” Blair asked.

“Yeah, it’s great,” Kas answered. “Try it sometime.” Turning to Angel, he added, “You only remember the sex things. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that.”

“I can’t help it if our caseworker was obsessed with sex.”

“You can help it if you are.”

“I have a very healthy sex drive for a man my age,” Angel said complacently. “I’m sure I can remember something that wasn’t about sex, though…Oh, I know, a few classes at the beginning of the program, they had the med students and the nursing students together, and there were a couple of times that Kas got better grades than I did. I have no idea what we were supposed to do about that, but they didn’t like it at all.”

“Yes, that’s very relevant for Blair and Jim.”

“I didn’t say it was relevant; I said it didn’t have to do with sex.”

Kas and Angel managed to come up with several other anecdotes from G-TAC training sessions. It was clear that they had encountered the organization’s much more benign public face, rather than the grim underside that Blair had been exposed to, but it was helpful to see them as a crew of bumbling idiots, rather than the faceless demons of his nightmares. Neither picture was complete, but both of them were true.

#

Blair leapt into full wakefulness, his heart hammering and his stomach churning with nauseous anxiety. He’d fallen asleep with much less difficulty than he had anticipated, thanks to Jim’s invitation to sleep upstairs in his bed, and had slept reasonably peacefully through the night, but now—a good hour before the alarm was due to go off—he had clearly done all the sleeping he was going to manage until the ordeal was over. 

He thought about going down to his room for something to read, but he found himself reluctant to leave Jim’s side, even for a moment. Instead, he hugged Jim’s arm where it was draped protectively across his chest, and focused on syncing up his own breathing with Jim’s slow, steady breaths, and on the warmth of Jim’s solid body behind him. 

Finally, the hour passed. Jim, as he often did, woke when the clock flipped to 6:59. He’d explained, when Blair asked, that the clock started to produce a high-pitched hum just before the regular alarm sounded. Jim slapped the alarm off, saying, “Are you ready for this?”

Blair shook his head. “I don’t suppose we can call in sick.”

“We could try, but they’d just make us reschedule.”

They got up, showered, and dressed without saying much more. In the kitchen, Blair’s stomach turned at the smell of coffee, and he dug in the cupboards for some mint tea to drink instead. 

“You should try to eat something, Chief,” Jim said. “Oatmeal, maybe?”

“Looks too much like someone’s already eaten it,” Blair said, shaking his head. “I could maybe handle some toast.”

Jim got out a loaf of bread and handed it to him. 

After choking down a meager breakfast, they headed down to the truck. Blair sat in the middle of the bench seat. Jim didn’t comment, just tucked Blair up against his side.

Murphy’s law being fully in effect, traffic was sparse and they hit green lights at nearly every intersection on the way to the G-TAC office. “Should we go in early, or sit here in the parking lot for ten minutes?” Jim asked.

“Sit,” Blair answered. 

“That’s what I figured you’d say.”

#

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Charlie said, opening his locker and taking out the jacket he had just put in there. 

“What are you doing?” Lorelei demanded.

“Going home. I’m calling in sick.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you!”

“If Ellison so much as smells me in the building, there’ll be plenty wrong with me. He’ll rip off my head and cram it down my throat.” Putting his jacket on, he slammed the locker closed. “You couldn’t have told me about this last week? I’d have made plans to be out of the country.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“You weren’t there. I barely made it out of the room ahead of him. I was surprised he didn’t come through the door.” 

“If you don’t clock in and report for work _immediately_ , I’ll have your job.”

“Finding another job’s easier than coming back from the dead. I’m out of here.”

#

Three minutes, before they had to go in. A man in a G-TAC trainer’s uniform burst through the side doors and scuttled through the parking lot, taking nervous looks over his shoulder. “Check that out,” Jim said, pointing through the windshield. 

Blair looked. “Okay, that’s weird.”

“Why?”

“He was one of my trainers. He’s the one who—Jim? Listen to your Guide, man, you need to chill out.” Blair leaned across him and pushed the door lock down. 

Jim realized he was growling, and forced himself to relax. “Bastard.”

“Yeah, but he’s a small fish, and if you kill him, where’s that going to leave me?” Blair asked pragmatically. “Actually, that’s an interesting question. If they sent you to prison, I’d pretty much have to go too, and I haven’t done anything. I ought to check up on that, see if there are any precedents.”

Blair had distracted Jim long enough for the trainer to get into his car. Jim settled for memorizing the license plate number. He could always track the trainer down later. 

“He sure looks like he’s in a hurry,” Blair noted, as the hatchback reversed out of its parking spot and sped away. “Maybe he heard you were coming,” he joked.

Jim thought that was actually a pretty good explanation for the trainer’s behavior. “Maybe.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s showtime, Chief.”

They got out of the truck, Blair falling into step a few paces behind Jim and just off his right shoulder. As they neared the building, though, Blair closed the distance between them, until he was practically stepping on Jim’s heels as they went up the steps. Jim decided not to say anything.

When he identified himself to the receptionist, her eyes went wide. “Just a moment—let me find out where you’re going to be meeting.” She picked up a phone and dialed. “Miss Marks? Detective Ellison is here.”

Jim distinctly heard their case worker’s voice on the other end. “Stall him. Offer him coffee or something. I’ll be down as soon as I figure out what we’re going to do with them now that Charlie ran away.”

Jim hid a smile. At least one of the G-TAC staff had the sense to be afraid of him, anyway. 

The receptionist hung up the phone. “It’ll just be a few minutes,” she said pleasantly. “Can I offer you some coffee or fruit juice?”

“No. Thank you.” There was a small waiting area off to one side, so Jim went and sat down. Blair stood behind him for a moment, long enough for Jim to wonder why he didn’t sit down, and then remember why and tell him to sit down.

Blair sat with his hands folded in his lap and his shoulders hunched. After about ten seconds, he started jiggling one foot up and down until Jim thought it was going to pop off at the knee and fly across the room. He wanted to tell Blair to knock it off and sit still, except he knew there was no chance Blair would actually do it, and it couldn’t be a good idea, here, to give an order he wasn’t prepared to enforce.

Finally, a man Jim recognized as Mr. Dench, the director, came down to the lobby. “Detective Ellison,” he said, extending a hand to shake. “Good morning.”

Jim nodded fractionally. “Morning.”

“Let’s go up to my office and have a little chat, and then I’ll introduce you to the trainer you’ll be working with today.”

“Fine.”

Blair kept pace beside him as they walked to the elevator. His racing heartbeat echoed in the elevator car; Jim was surprised that Mr. Dench couldn’t hear it. But evidently he couldn’t, because he just said pleasantly, “I’m afraid you’ve gotten a very negative impression of what we do here, Detective. I hope we can show you that there are, well, two sides to every story.” He started to laugh, then stopped abruptly when Jim didn’t join in. “We take the welfare of our Guides very seriously. Making sure that they live happy, secure, and productive lives is our top priority.”

“Is it.” 

“It is, Detective.” The elevator stopped, and they exited. “My office is just this way. Would you like some coffee? A Danish?”

“No,” Jim said. “Thanks.” He let Mr. Dench take the lead, so he could take a look at Blair behind his back. Blair met his eyes and nodded slightly.

So far, so good. 

“Please, have a seat,” Mr. Dench invited, once they were in the office. It was bigger than Simon’s down at the station, with thick carpet and pictures of Sentinel-Guide pairs on the walls. Jim motioned Blair into the visitor’s chair farthest from the door and took the one beside him. “You’ve made an impressive amount of progress with your Guide in such a short time.”

Jim pointedly didn’t answer.

“I’m sure that Guide Ellison feels that he’s--”

“Sandburg,” Jim said flatly.

“I’m sorry?”

“His name’s Sandburg.”

“You _are_ Bonded?”

“Yes.”

“I…see. In any case, I’m sure your Guide feels that he’s been badly treated here, and from your attitude, it seems that he has persuaded you to accept his…interpretation.”

“Right,” Jim said, between gritted teeth. “I wouldn’t have any idea how to interpret eight broken fingers on my own.”

“I’m not denying that we had to use some harsh training methods with him,” Mr. Dench conceded. “But he brought all of this on himself. He could have ended it at any time simply by choosing appropriate behaviors.”

“You’re saying he drove you to it.”

“ _Now_ you’re beginning to understand,” Mr. Dench said, without apparent irony. “Sandburg has been the most difficult case we’ve ever had in the entire Northwest region. You’re his fourth placement in less than two years—which is a record—but all three of the previous Sentinels ultimately returned him for re-training. Since you’ve Bonded with him, his placement with you cannot be terminated, even if you begin to find his behavior unacceptable. This makes it especially important for us to develop a behavior management plan that can be applied at home and in your workplace.”

Under cover of the desk, Jim edged his foot sideways until his calf rested against Blair’s. “His behavior is fine.”

“That’s wonderful, but realistically, we can’t expect that to continue indefinitely. All Bonded pairs experience some friction.”

Funny; Angel Temas had said the same thing. His ideas about how to deal with it were a lot more palatable, though. “That’s true of any relationship,” Jim pointed out.

“Of course.” Dench gave him a patronizing smile. “But in a Sentinel-Guide relationship, friction can be minimized by adhering to the natural hierarchy. Sentinels are drawn to control and authority, and Guides crave order and structure. Now, your Guide may _feel_ otherwise, but he’ll ultimately be happier and more secure if he has a clearly defined place in your life.”

Blair’s leg was jumping against his; Jim could practically feel him wanting to tell Mr. Dench all the ways he was wrong. But Jim had been the star pupil of Sandburg School of Anthropology and Related Subjects for long enough to know how to ask the right kind of questions. “How do you figure that?”

With a straight line like that, Sandburg would have been off and running for at least twenty minutes, but Mr. Dench just said, “Ah, it’s a well-known fact,” with a nervous laugh.

Blair, at this point, was practically vibrating. Jim stepped down on his toe and said, “Since when? Who discovered it, and how?”

“Ah…experts, in the field. With research.”

“Oh, research,” Jim said. “Sure.” Then, before Blair could _actually explode_ , he quickly added, “Hey, Chief, do you know anything about that?”

“Do I ever,” Blair said, before settling down to his theme. “The study you’re referring to was done in 1946 and funded by the Sentinel-Guide Division of the Selective Service Administration, which later became the SGRB and then split into the SRB and G-TAC. The study examined only Sentinel-Guide pairs rated as ‘highly successful’ by the SGD. The criteria used to evaluate pairs as ‘highly successful’ were virtually identical to the ones used in the study, so in essence, the subject pool was rigged to create the exact result the researchers were going for. Even leaving aside the subject selection, the survey questions were so poorly designed that my research methods class actually used them as an example of how _not_ to design a valid survey instrument. Since 1946, at least half a dozen qualitative studies and ten times that many case studies from cultures around the world have failed to replicate its results, coming as close as is humanly possible in the social sciences to proving that the SGD study was completely and utterly worthless.”

Blair sank back into his chair, breathing hard.

“Okay then,” Jim said. He wanted to ask what the other studies had shown, but this probably wasn’t the time. “There you go,” he said to Dench.

Mr. Dench blinked at him for several long moments. Jim could hear his eyelids squelching. “Detective Ellison, is that the sort of behavior that you consider acceptable?”

Jim shrugged. “If I didn’t want to know the answer, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“I see.” He sat back in his chair, the springs squeaking in protest. “Detective, no one is denying that your Guide has considerable education. An excessive amount, perhaps, for his position in life. But since that can’t be changed, I would strongly suggest that you…discourage…any similar displays of…erudition.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s not appropriate.”

“Why not?”

Dench answered very slowly, clearly weighing his words carefully to avoid anything that might give Jim an opening to unleash Blair on him again. “As a Guide, his role is to support your work. The best Guides are able to blend into the background, and not to draw any attention to themselves.”

Involuntarily, Jim glanced over at Blair. “The best according to who? Oh, let me guess. Experts, with research.”

“Detective, this hostility is unnecessary and counterproductive. If you choose to turn everything into an argument, this is going to be a very long day.”

Jim seriously considered asking if they’d try beating him if he didn’t stop. He was still considering it when Blair murmured, too softly for anyone but a Sentinel to hear, “ _What happened to playing along_?”

Right. So far, Blair was doing a much better job of sticking to the plan than he was. At least he’d held in that lecture until Jim had asked for it. Gritting his teeth, he said, “Fine. Go on.”

“Thank you. As I’ve said, it’s ultimately your responsibility to manage your Guide’s behavior. And incidentally, continuing to resist our efforts to help you do that will only make things more difficult for both of you. The sooner you can put aside your hostility, the sooner and more easily he’ll be able to develop a habit of appropriate behavior.”

Not trusting himself to speak, Jim nodded.

“We’ve found that many of our Sentinels are more comfortable working with another Sentinel—someone who can really understand where they’re coming from. We’ve arranged for you to work with Sentinel Michelle Masden. She normally works at one of our satellite offices, so we’ve had her come in specially to work with you.”

Jim suspected that what Mr. Dench really meant was that all of the other trainers, like Charlie, were afraid to be in the same room with him. 

On balance, Jim decided he was okay with that. 

“Let me see if she’s made it in yet,” Mr. Dench continued. “I think she had some trouble with traffic.” He picked up his phone and pressed a button. “Sally? Yes, is Ms. Masden in yet?”

“No,” the Director’s secretary said on the other end of the phone. “Lorelei wasn’t able to get a hold of her en route, so we had to get a message to her when she reported in at the field office. She’s pretty upset that we didn’t let her know earlier that we needed her here. Michelle, I mean. Lorelei’s pretty ticked off, though, too.”

Jim smiled to himself. Did these people really have no idea what Sentinel hearing was like? Blair nudged him and mouthed, “ _What_?” 

“ _Tell you later_ ,” Jim mouthed back.

“Thank you, Sally. Just let me know when she arrives.” Hanging up, he said to Jim, “Miss Marks was going to work with you later in the day, but let me see if she might be able to meet with you now.” He picked up the receiver again. “Sally? Put me through to Miss Marks, please. Lori? Yes, are you able to see Detective Ellison? Now?” Jim couldn’t hear her reply, but Dench said, “Thank you,” and hung up. “She’ll be right here.”

Ms. Marks came through the door a moment later. “Sir. Detective,” she added, nodding to Jim. “Let’s go down to one of the training rooms, and I’ll work with you until Michelle manages to get here.”

“Ah, Lori?” Mr. Dench said. “We’re going to put them in conference room three. There’s no need to upset Detective Ellison.”

Jim noticed a brief flash of fury on the woman’s face, before she hid it behind a bland mask. “Of course, sir, excellent idea. Right this way, Detective.”

She showed them down the hall to a small conference room, with a table surrounded by about six upholstered chairs. “Let’s see what you’ve managed to accomplish,” she said, with a sharp-toothed smile. “Guide, kneel.”

Jim held up one hand. “He only takes orders from me.”

“I see,” Marks said tightly. After a long moment, she ground out, “Ask him to kneel, please.”

Jim hesitated. They had agreed they were going to do this. If playing along would help prevent them from having any worse trouble with G-TAC, it would be worth it. But now that the time had come, his skin was crawling, and he could barely force out the word. “Kneel.”

Blair dropped to his knees. Jim felt like he was going to throw up. 

Marks issued several more commands for him to pass along—stand, sit, kneel again, face the wall. Blair executed them perfectly, his expression carefully blank. He seemed to have a much easier time with the exercise than Jim was having. Jim wasn’t sure if that was true, or if he was just a better actor. 

“Have him strip,” Lorelei said.

He didn’t need Blair to signal him that this was going too far. “No.” 

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t want anyone else seeing my Guide undressed,” Jim said.

“Fine. Have him leave his underwear on.”

“No,” Jim repeated. “You’ve seen enough. Did you have anything else planned?”

She glared at him for a moment, then snapped, “Show me how you correct him when he misbehaves.”

“I don’t.” 

“You…don’t,” she repeated.

“I don’t have to,” he added. “He doesn’t misbehave.”

“I find that highly unlikely.”

“Find it however you want to find it,” Jim said. “He’s been more than cooperative with this little demonstration. I’m not ‘correcting’ him when he hasn’t done anything wrong. What’s next on the agenda?”

What was next, apparently, was more of the same. She kept drilling Blair on basic commands until Jim was just about ready to scream. Blair kept his responses sharp and correct, but Jim could tell that his patience was wearing thin, too. Finally, Jim said, “That’s enough. Whatever you’re trying to prove, you’ve proved it. Chief, have a seat,” he said, kicking one of the chairs away from the table and pointing to it. 

Blair shot him a look over his shoulder and sat down. Jim squeezed his shoulder apologetically as he took the seat next to him. Under the table, Blair’s knee bumped his. 

Staring at them, Marks stalked around to the head of the table and sat down. “Detective Ellison, this training session has not been scheduled for your personal convenience. It’s been scheduled to ensure that you are able to manage your Guide appropriately.”

“Is that so.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with this little performance, but all I’ve seen so far is proof that this little—renegade—has duped you into covering for him. _Both_ of you will learn to conduct yourselves in accordance with the expectations of this department, or so help me you will regret it.”

“Are you threatening me?” Jim asked, incredulous. 

“Of course not, Mr. Ellison,” she said, smiling like a shark. “It would be incredibly foolish to threaten a Sentinel.”

#

After watching Marks and Jim verbally spar with each other for half an hour, the arrival of the trainer was almost a relief. She was—he was glad to see—one that he hadn’t encountered before, although he’d suspected that from the time that the Director announced that the trainer was a Sentinel. He was likewise unsurprised to see that she was followed into the room by a Guide, even though Mr. Dench hadn’t mentioned one.

“Trainer Masden,” Marks said, turning her feral smile on the new arrival. “So nice of you to join us.”

“I came as quickly as I could with no notice,” the Sentinel replied. She wore her trainer’s uniform with near military precision—most of the trainers tended to be sloppier about it. Her Guide, similarly dressed in the G-TAC issue uniform, was silent and impassive—blending, as Dench had said, into the background. “I’ll take over from here, thank you.”

“I’d like to take a few moments to review the case with you,” Marks tried.

“I had Tim read me the file in the car,” Masden answered. “But I’ll be sure to let you know if I have any questions.”

“You do that,” Marks said. “I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

Satisfied that she had gained the upper hand, the case worker left. Blair was surprised they hadn’t actually started pissing on each other’s territory. Masden and her Guide circled around the table to sit across from him and Jim. “Detective Ellison? I’m Michelle,” she said, extending her hand across the table. 

Jim shook it cautiously. “Hi.”

“And this must be Blair.” She did not, Blair noticed, offer to shake his hand. “Jim—may I call you Jim?” 

Jim grudgingly nodded.

“I’m in a unique position to help you and Blair, because I have experience of my own with a—let’s say a _difficult_ Guide. You wouldn’t know it now, but Tim was quite a handful when I first met him.”

Blair glanced over at Tim. He was as expressionless as ever; if he’d met Tim and Michelle before hooking up with Jim, it would have been scary as hell. Now he knew, though, that he’d never turn into that. He’d never have to.

“Now he’s a credit to G-TAC, and I’m sure Blair can be too.”

Jim let his hand drop under the table and squeezed Blair’s arm. 

“I understand from the file that you’ve made considerable progress with him already. What can you tell me about what you’ve been doing with him?”

Jim hesitated. This wasn’t a question they had prepared for, and while Blair could have easily spun a line of bullshit that would sound good without actually saying anything, Jim was clearly not sure where to start. Unfortunately, Blair couldn’t think of any way to feed him lines—Morse code would be way too slow, even if he knew it. 

“I know it’s a radical idea,” Jim finally said, “but I’ve been treating him like he’s my colleague and my friend. It’s been working pretty well for us.”

Oh—the truth. Blair could have come up with a better answer than that.

Masden nodded. “I see. I completely understand your reluctance to use negative methods with your Guide— _none_ of us enjoy hurting our Guides. I’m not sure that I’d personally undertake to handle such a difficult case with only positive reinforcement, but the most important thing is to come up with a system that works for you. Positive reinforcement,” she added, “simply means that we reward the behavior that we want to see, while negative reinforcement is correcting the behavior that we _don’t_ want to see.”

Blair bit his lip to keep from pointing out that that wasn’t what positive and negative reinforcement at all. It was a common mistake, but not one that anyone who had passed a freshman psychology course had any excuse to make. 

“Positive reinforcement systems are very flexible, because almost anything can be used as a reinforcer. You can reinforce a basic level of acceptable behavior by turning his everyday needs into reinforcers—things like meals, sleeping in a bed, hygiene activities. He’ll quickly learn that if he cooperates, his life will be much more comfortable. Once the basics are achieved, you can offer more rewards for additional desired behaviors.”

What Masden was saying wasn’t anything new to Blair. Not only was it basic operant conditioning—even if she did have the terms wrong—but all three of his other Sentinels had tried some version of what she was suggesting.

“Now, keeping track of every behavior is a lot of work for you, and it’s very difficult outside of a controlled situation like we have here at the training center. A simpler version to use at home is a level system. At the lowest level, he receives minimal amounts of non-preferred food—protein shakes are a good choice, especially at room temperature—he sleeps on the bare floor, and takes cold showers when it becomes necessary for your comfort. A certain number of days of appropriate behavior are required to move up to the higher levels and earn additional privileges.”

Under the table, Jim twined his fingers in Blair’s. “Like what?”

“Well, at the second level he’d get more food, and a little more variety—add just a few things, like canned soup or peanut butter sandwiches—maybe a blanket, the chance to shower every day. Then at three he gets to have normal table food—what you have, in controlled portions—hot showers, and a mattress or pad to sleep on. You want to make it pretty easy to get to level three—the first two levels are hard to maintain for long, so say maybe a week of just basic, acceptable behavior to move through those levels. He does as he’s told, speaks to you respectfully, doesn’t beg or complain—that’s it. It’s tempting to be really strict at the beginning, but if he can maintain a pleasant, cooperative attitude on levels one and two, you’re making great progress.”

“When it comes to moving into the higher levels, though, when you’re getting into privileges beyond the very basics, that’s when you want to make it challenging. At level four, he might get to occasionally choose what he wants to eat, or ask for seconds. You might let him have access to the shower products he likes—the brands of soap and toothpaste that he prefers. And so on—at the higher levels you might allow him to read or watch television, or to wear clothing of his choice, or whatever seems suitable. Now, does this sound like something that would work for you?”

Jim stared at her for a long moment. Finally he said, “It’s an idea.”

In other words, as Blair recalled from their conversation last night, _Are you out of your fucking mind?_

But Masden didn’t know the code, so she said, “Good! Let’s keep working on it, then,” and got out some—Blair almost laughed out loud—worksheets.

Blair was relieved, for a change, to be treated like he wasn’t actually there. If he had gotten his own copies, he’d have been unable to resist putting down sarcastic answers, possibly ones about how much oxygen he was allowed to consume at each level. But Jim had the worksheet, and with a Sentinel across the table watching him, he had to put down what would pass for serious answers. Blair didn’t envy him at all.

It was pretty funny—or would have been, if it weren’t so revolting and offensive—until they got as far as level six, and Masden said, “At the higher levels, you might consider the Guide about what kind of reinforcers will be most effective.”

He knew why she was doing it—she probably thought it was a really clever way to make him participate in his own oppression, while not actually giving him any real control over anything. 

Jim had been sweating over the form for almost an hour by then, and Blair was pretty sure his, “Great idea!” was sincere. “Blair, what could we put here?”

The first thing that popped into his head was that he _really could not_ say “a pony.” 

But now he couldn’t think of anything else. Okay, go with the pony theme…a dog? No, Jim was allergic. Same for a cat. Or a hamster. What wasn’t Jim allergic to? “Goldfish!”

Jim stared at him. 

Oh, shit. “Uh, I’ve never had a pet, you know, moving around a lot…I think a goldfish would be nice,” he said lamely. “But maybe that would be more for eight or nine?”

“It could be a good idea to include some long-term reinforcers, say if he stays at level six or above for a year,” Masden said. “Something like a…goldfish…might work for that.”

She had to know they were fucking with her. Jim said quickly, “Goldfish, fine, I’m putting that down.”

After that, Blair figured out that a much easier solution was to fill in things he already had. A library card and a phone call to his mother were duly filled in for levels seven and eight, and then for nine, a desk in his room.

At level ten, they were both out of ideas. “What about…” Jim began, “—no, we already have that.”

Then Blair had an idea that was completely unfair, but too good not to use. “You could let me drive your truck.”

He could see Jim wanting to say, _hell no_ , but if he did, they’d be stuck on the damn worksheet for who knew how long. Finally Jim said, “Okay,” and wrote it down. 

Blair wished he’d thought of it earlier. It wasn’t like they were actually going to _use_ the damn behavior plan, but if Jim got even the barest glimmering of an idea in that direction—well, there was the truck thing. 

That was the last fun he had for a while, though, because the next thing Masden wanted to work on was a list of “challenge behaviors.” Those were, she explained, things that he really wouldn’t want to do, but that Jim would make him to do move into the higher levels, as a way of demonstrating his authority. A few of her suggestions weren’t particularly twisted, like having him stand at attention from dinner until bedtime, but others gave him way more insight than he wanted to have about the miserable life that poor bastard sitting across the table from him must lead. 

The last exercise for the morning was coming up with a schedule of “household responsibilities.” “Of course the weekly schedule doesn’t prevent you from adding additional tasks as needed, but once the routine is established, he should complete his daily chores without being told, reliving you of the responsibility of keeping track of these kinds of details,” Masden explained.

Blair wasn’t surprised to see that Jim didn’t have much trouble with that, since he already did his housework on a schedule—some things every day, like wiping down the kitchen and bathroom surfaces, and others weekly, like mopping the floors and dusting. He just wrote down what he already did, and they let Masden assume that Blair would be doing it.

Actually, once it was all written out, it started to look like a lot of work. He should probably start pitching in with it. Or maybe divide up the schedule and put it on the fridge, because half of the things on there it would never in a million years occur to him to do— _dust blinds weekly/wash monthly_? Seriously? Did anybody do that?

Finally, Jim finished with the chore chart, and Masden suggested they break for lunch. “Let’s resume in a half an hour—there’s a cafeteria down on the first floor, so we won’t need to go anywhere.”

Great. He hadn’t really expected that they’d get a lunch break out of the building, but he’d been holding out a slim hope that they would. He was all right—surprisingly—but Jim seemed like he was stretched pretty thin. 

Since they were all going to the same place, it looked like they were going to be stuck in the elevator with Marsden and Tim—and maybe even stuck eating with them, too—until Jim ducked into the men’s room across from the elevator bay.

Fortunately, Masden wasn’t sufficiently committed to keeping tabs on them to send Tim in after them. Jim hustled him into the handicapped stall and locked the door behind them, then pulled Blair up against his chest. 

“They gone yet?” Blair whispered.

Jim held up one finger. “Now they are,” he said after a moment. “How are you holding up, Chief?”

“Okay,” Blair said. “I’ve got the easy part here, though. All I have to do is keep my mouth shut.”

“Didn’t know you knew how to do that.”

“When we’re done here, I’m going to have to tell you more than you wanted to know about what ‘positive reinforcement’ actually is,” he admitted. “And about the use of token economies in juvenile detention facilities and experimental primate colonies. You might actually be interested in that part. Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about what Angel’s going to say if we show him that behavior plan.”

Jim thought about that for a moment, then laughed, nervous but genuine. “Oh, God. He’ll pop a blood vessel.”

“Can you imagine if they met? Matter and antimatter, man.” He mimed an explosion.

“I would pay to see that,” Jim agreed. He looked toward the door and said reluctantly, “We should probably get down there, unless one of us is going to fake being sick.” 

“Since she’s a Sentinel, I don’t think faking it would work,” Blair said. Since he already felt pretty sick, he’d have considered shoving a finger down his throat for the good of the team if it was really necessary, but Jim seemed a little revived by the few minutes of normal conversation with his Guide. “Hang on, I have to pee before we go.”

Once that was accomplished, the slid the masks back on and stepped out into the hallway.

Blair wasn’t terribly surprised to find that the employee cafeteria served food that was noticeably better than the slop the prisoners got, if they were lucky. The room, though, was crawling with G-TAC, of course—including several trainers that he _did_ recognize. Wordlessly, Jim gathered him in against his side, putting his body between Blair and the rest of the room, as they crossed to the serving line. 

“What do you want, Chief?” Jim asked, indicating the selection of sandwiches, soups, and hot meals. 

Blair would have pointed out to Jim how much he sucked at this playing along thing, but he was trying _not_ to suck at it. And trying not to hyperventilate or throw up. “Um.”

Jim picked up two of the wrapped sandwiches and two fruit cups. “Right, let’s just get these and get out of here.”

Throwing some money in the general direction of the cashier, Jim hustled him back out of the room. “What do you think, back to the conference room?”

“Maybe we left something in the truck,” Blair suggested. 

“Right,” Jim agreed. “We did. That…important thing.”

There was a guard by the door in the lobby now, but he didn’t make any attempt to stop them. When they hit the pavement, Blair let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. In the truck, Jim turned on the radio, something he usually refused to do when the truck wasn’t running, since it wore down the battery. “I guess we can’t just drive away,” Blair said.

“We’d better not. Only four hours to go. You want the--” Jim checked the sandwich labels. “—turkey and cheese, or pastrami?”

“Pastrami, I guess.” He wasn’t sure he could eat, but he figured he had better at least try. 

Jim passed him the sandwich and one of the fruit cups. They were the kind that were mostly syrup—luckily enough, since Jim hadn’t taken the time to get anything to drink. 

Or spoons. Blair peeled the foil of off his fruit and slurped up some of the syrup. 

“So,” Jim said after a moment. “Primates?”

“Oh, yeah. Usually when they train monkeys or apes to perform tasks, they use food rewards,” Blair explained. “But then if the primates aren’t hungry anymore, they stop participating. So in this one experiment, they put these vending machines in the enclosures, and then set it up so the monkeys could earn tokens that they could use to buy stuff. One token gets you a handful of monkey chow, two tokens maybe a banana—like that.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “And it worked?”

“Oh, yeah. The monkeys actually started exchanging the tokens among themselves, for things like grooming and sex.”

“Monkey prostitution?” Jim asked. 

“It’s pretty well-documented that in the wild, monkeys exchange food for social interaction, including sex. You can describe it as either prostitution or as one monkey giving the other one a courtship gift—it’s kind of an interesting example of how the same observed behavior can be framed in different ways, depending on the observer’s biases.” He shrugged. “The other thing I know about token economies is that they use them in a lot of schools for kids with special needs, treatment centers, and juvenile detention facilities. They kind of work, especially over the short term, when the rewards are compelling enough. It’s basic operant conditioning. But there was this one case in the 70’s…might have been the 80’s…where this juvenile detention facility did the same kind of Orwellian setup she was talking about in there.” He gestured vaguely over his shoulder at the building. “Where basic human dignity is a privilege you supposedly earn by performing like a chimpanzee.”

“And?”

“Oh. After a couple of months the place just exploded into a riot. Supposedly with no warning, according to the people who worked there. One day they were patting themselves on the back that it was working great; the next day—boom.”

Meditatively, Jim chewed a bite of his sandwich. “Probably a good thing you didn’t tell that story in there.”

“Uh-huh.” He managed a bit of his own sandwich. “Of course, to get a good riot going, you need more prisoners than guards. They have this one-on-one system going, and the whole isolate and conquer thing. I wonder if they make sure the less cooperative Sentinels get the really gung-ho Guides. I bet they do.” 

“Except for us,” Jim pointed out. 

“And Kas, and Angel,” Blair added. “Maybe not; maybe they aren’t that careful.” Thinking about that, he added, “I wonder if Sentinels are really as territorial as everyone says, or if they just don’t want them—and us—getting together to compare notes.” He’d always taken it for granted that the territoriality of Sentinels was a real phenomenon, but it certainly was a _convenient_ one. And would instinctive territorial behavior really have any survival value in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness? It could, if tribal groups lived in close proximity and competed for resources…but it could just as easily prevent productive cross-cultural encounters, for trade or the exchange of ideas and technology.

“I don’t know, Chief,” Jim said. “I don’t know many other Sentinels I like. Angel’s okay,” he added.

“Yeah, well, it’s hard to weed out socialization factors there. I mean, that department Guide—Sam—said most of the Sentinels in the PD were assholes anyway.”

“He said that?”

“I’m paraphrasing. But then, apparently Sentinels are supposed to be assholes to Guides, so who knows.” He shrugged. “That’s why anthropologists like to study isolated cultures, but there are still social and cultural factors, just different ones. A Sentinel in an isolated tribe isn’t going to have much contact with other Sentinels, but that’s because they don’t have much contact with any outsiders, by definition. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an isolated tribe.”

“Right, I got that,” Jim said. “Maybe next time you go visit an isolated tribe, you should take a Sentinel with you.”

“There’s an idea.” Not that he’d be visiting any isolated tribes any time soon. 

Without really noticing, he’d managed to eat three-quarters of his sandwich. That was plenty, he decided, stuffing the last quarter back in the wrapper and tossing down the rest of his fruit cup. “How much longer do we have?” he asked.

Jim glanced at his watch. “About ten minutes.”

“Maybe we should have an explanation ready about what we were doing out here,” Blair suggested. 

“I thought we had to get the thing out of the truck.”

“What thing?”

“Oh, right…my cell phone,” Jim decided. “I had to call work. Actually,” he added, taking the phone out from his jacket pocked, “maybe there’s been some kind of emergency…a multiple homicide or something….” He dialed the station. “Captain Banks—it’s Ellison…yes, we’re fine. We’re on our lunch break…it—could be worse,” he said, looking over at Blair. 

Blair nodded—yes, it definitely could.

“Yes, I’ll let you know…right, we might as well get it over with. Okay. Here.” Jim held out the phone. “He wants to hear your voice.”

Blair took the phone. “I’m still alive.”

“Good. Are you all right, son?”

“Yeah,” Blair said. “I mean, it’s not fun, but they haven’t done anything to me.”

“Okay. I’ll see you and Jim tomorrow, bright and early.”

“Okay.” He handed the phone back, and Jim closed it and put it back in his pocket. “We should do something nice when we get done here.”

“We could go get you that goldfish,” Jim suggested. “Does it have to be a goldfish? They get really big and dirty. Some kind of tropical fish might be better.”

“I don’t really want a fish,” Blair explained. “I just couldn’t think of anything to say.”

“Oh. Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Thanks anyway.”

“But the only way you’re driving my truck is if you’re taking me to the hospital.”

Blair laughed. “Yeah, I figured.”

“I guess we’ll have to find you a car, when you start school. If you drive. Do you drive?”

He nodded. “I have an international license…somewhere.” It had disappeared, along with his passport, when he was captured at the airport.

“We’ll have to get you a new one.” He glanced at his watch again. “You ready?”

Blair nodded again. “As I’ll ever be. Yeah. I mean, this is nothing.” It wasn’t nothing—it was ritual humiliation, meant to degrade him in front of the most important person in his life—but it wasn’t _working_ , and that was the important thing. 

#

Walking Blair back into the G-TAC building might have been the hardest thing Jim had ever done. During their lunch break, he’d been able to relax at least a little, but with every step back toward the door, Blair seemed to shrink in on himself, his face grew less expressive, his heart rate increased, and his breathing became more shallow. 

Jim wondered if Blair really thought he was “okay,” and that what he was experiencing was “nothing,” or if Blair was trying to protect him. Either one was heartbreaking. 

Jim had hoped that perhaps the worst was over, but when they got back to the conference room, Lorelei Marks was setting up a TV and VCR in the corner. Jim knew instantly that whatever she planned to show them was something he did _not_ want to see. 

He decided not to acknowledge her, and instead motioned Blair into the chair farthest away from her. Shortly after they were settled, Masden and her Guide came back. “Ms. Marks,” Masden said. “I’m sorry, we have this room reserved for the rest of the day.”

“Yes, I know. I thought that to give you and Detective Ellison a better idea of exactly what you’re dealing with, we should review some of the video from Sandburg’s training sessions.”

Blair moaned, “Oh my God….” 

Jim was fairly sure that Marks hadn’t heard, and that Masden had. She didn’t say anything, though, and just glanced over at him sharply before telling Marks, “Thank you for your help, but I don’t think that’s necessary. I’ve reviewed the case file.”

Marks tilted her head to one side and smiled frostily. “Sentinel, you’re here today at my request. I am ultimately responsible for managing this case. Would you like me to have the Director explain it to you?”

Masden looked away. “Tim, wait outside.”

Jim wished he could send his Guide out of the room, too, but leaving him on his own would be even worse than what Marks had planned. She pushed a tape into the player and sat down, holding the remote. “Are we ready?” she asked brightly. 

Jim didn’t answer. Masden, taking her own seat, said, “We’re on a schedule. Just get on with it.”

Marks raised the remote, and the blue screen of the TV was replaced by a dim, poorly focused image of a cell. Out of the corner of his eye, Jim saw Blair bend forward, hiding his head in his arms. 

“Guide, sit up straight,” Marks ordered, pausing the tape.

“Don’t,” Jim said, patting his shoulder. “He doesn’t need to see this; he was there.”

“He needs a reminder of the consequences of his actions.”

“He does not.” Jim met her hard stare and didn’t back down; after almost a full minute, Marks angrily pressed “play” again, and cranked up the volume.

Following Blair’s lead, Jim focused on a point just above the TV screen. He really didn’t need to see what was on that tape. He couldn’t tune out the sound track, though—not if he wanted to be able to keep tabs on exactly how distressed Blair was, which he definitely did. He’d end this, somehow, if he had to. 

So he heard a harsh voice barking, “Stand. Face front. Kneel. I said _kneel_ ,” followed by a series of thuds of a stick or baton hitting flesh. “Are you ready to obey now?”

“Fuck off,” Blair said on the tape. 

More thuds followed.

“Jim?” Blair whispered next to him. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Turning to him, Jim rested a hand on the back of his neck. He was panting, and his skin and gone clammy. “Turn that shit off,” he growled over his shoulder. “You’re okay, buddy. Take a deep breath.”

Blair drew in a deep, shuddering breath. 

“Better?”

He nodded and took another deep breath. 

The video was still playing, but only for another moment, until Masden stalked over to the TV and switched it off. “This is completely unnecessary,” she said, her voice shaking with rage.   
“And I _insist_ that we see what the Director has to say about it.”

“My pleasure.”

The two women left, and Tim the Guide slunk back in. 

“Okay, Chief?” Jim asked. 

Blair nodded and sat up, swallowing hard. Jim put his arm around him and patted his shoulder. On the edge of his awareness, he noticed Tim looking at them, or maybe through them, with the kind of hundred-yard stare Jim had only seen in men who had seen things no one should have to see. “Do you think you could get him some water, Tim?” Jim asked. 

The Guide stood, saying tonelessly, “Yes, sir.”

“Thanks.”

Once he was gone, Jim said, “Do we need to get out of here?”

Blair hesitated, then shook his head. “They’ll just make us come back.”

He was probably right. “Okay.” He patted Blair’s shoulder and left his side for just a moment, grabbing the tape out of the machine. Flipping open the hinged side of the cassette, he started pulling out the magnetic tape.

Blair smiled faintly. “You know they’ve probably got dozens of those,” he pointed out.

“It’s a start.”

Jim was throwing the handfuls of tape into the trash can when Tim came back. Silently, he gave Jim both a bottle of water and a paper towel that had been dampened under the faucet. “Thanks.”

Blair raised his head slightly and echoed, “Thanks, man.”

Tim met his eyes for a second, then glanced guiltily over toward the door. Jim listened, searching for the sound of Marks or Masden’s voice.

“—absolutely sadistic,” Masden was saying. “It’s torture, pure and simple, to make a Sentinel watch his Guide being punished like that.”

She was half right, anyway.

“He is not watching the rest of that tape. I’m prepared to hand in my resignation if necessary.”

Marks said, “He doesn’t--”

Mr. Dench interrupted her. “Lori, sit down. Ms. Masden, I agree that Ms. Marks showed poor judgment. I’m sure that she had the best of intentions, but--”

“ _Bullshit_!” Masden said.

“Language, please, ladies. It’s our policy not to show training tapes to Sentinels, and for very good reason. Ms. Marks, I would suggest that you remain out of Sentinel Ellison’s sight for the rest of the day. You might want to use the time to compose a letter of apology. Ms. Masden, your resignation will not be necessary, and on behalf of Ms. Marks, I apologize.”

He heard Marks, Masden, and Dench standing up, and returned his attention to the conference room. “They’re on their way back,” he told the Guides.

Tim straightened up, even though he had been sitting up straight before. Blair edged closer to him. 

Masden and Dench came into the room. Dench said, “Detective Ellison, I apologize for Ms. Marks’s actions. She acted without my authorization, and she has been reprimanded.”

“ _Reprimanded_?” Blair muttered.

“Excuse me?” Masden said sharply.

Blair stared at her, his heart racing and the sour stink of fear pouring off of him. “What do you mean _reprimanded?_ ”

Mr. Dench smiled thinly. “Guide Sandburg, you have several college degrees. I’m sure you know what the word ‘reprimanded’ means.”

“I know what it means downstairs,” Blair said flatly. “I’m just not quite clear on what it means up here.”

Dench shook his head and muttered, “ _Honestly_ ….”

“Well?” Jim demanded. 

Dench stared at him for a long moment. “I’ll be placing a note in her personnel file,” he finally snapped. “Satisfied?”

“Not particularly.” 

Mr. Dench ignored his answer. “I believe Ms. Masden has some more things that she would like to complete with you, so I’ll let her get to it.”

After he left, Masden stood silently by the door for several moments. Finally she said, her voice shaking slightly, “Detective, if you don’t mind, I need a few moments with my Guide.”

Jim briefly considered refusing, pointing out that he and Blair had much more reason to be upset than she did. But she had, in a way, taken their side—and anyway, Blair was starting to get up. Jim followed him. “Sure. We’ll be--” He gestured down to the opposite end of the hall from where Dench’s office was. 

At that end of the hall, there was a vending machine—which must have been where Tim had gotten the water—and a window. They leaned against the sill, both looking out over the parking lot. “Is he okay in there?” Blair asked after a moment.

Jim was confused for a moment, then realized he must mean Tim. He listened, for a moment. “— _worry, Michelle, everything’s okay,_ ” the Guide was saying.

“Yeah. He’s…comforting her.”

“Huh.” Blair shrugged. “Guides. What can ya do.”

After a few more minutes, Tim came out in the hallway and waved them back in. Jim wondered what Masden would say about the video, about her reaction to it, about any of it. But what she said was nothing, or at least, nothing direct. 

“Okay,” she said. “Right. So obviously there are going to be times when you, stressful times, I mean, when you want to comfort your Guide, even if his behavior isn’t really…doesn’t really warrant it. And you don’t want to reinforce, reinforce the wrong kind of behavior. So what you want to do then is give him some kind of…something really easy to do, so you can reinforce it. Like you can…you can just drop something and tell him to pick it up. Anything like that. And then, you know, you can reinforce that.” 

“Okay,” Jim said carefully. 

Blair shifted uncomfortably beside him. 

“I’m sorry,” Masden said. “Let’s…let’s move on to setting down some house rules.” She rummaged in her briefcase and brought out more forms. “Tim, why don’t you….”

Tim took the forms and handed one to Jim. “Okay, it looks like this form is the daily schedule,” he said slowly.

“Okay,” Masden said. “Just do that one.”

Blair opened his mouth, then closed it again, giving Jim a significant look.

He’d have to remember to ask him later what he had wanted to say.

“All right. We usually do one daily schedule for work days, and one for days off,” Tim said, glancing back and forth between Jim and his own Sentinel. “What time do you usually get up?”

The schedule wasn’t hard to do, since for most of it Jim could just put down what they actually did, or some approximation, anyway. The schedule was obsessively detailed, covering questions such as who showered first, and what Blair was supposed to be doing while Jim was in the shower. Jim wondered if Tim was just vamping for time.

If he was, it worked. By the time they were done with the daily schedule, Masden had pulled herself together, and was able to take them through the house rules worksheet, and the work rules worksheet, and the other public places rules worksheet. The work and public rules sheets covered things like how many steps away from Jim Blair was allowed to be, and whether he was allowed to speak or make eye contact with anyone else. 

“Most of these things are covered in the Guide’s training, but everyone likes to make their own adjustments, and I’m not sure if Blair’s had the protocol lessons, since he…left early.”

“I had them before my other three placements,” Blair told her, surprisingly gently. 

“Oh. Right. Well, it’s better to go over everything…a lot of Sentinels aren’t familiar with the protocols anyway, and then you end up in a situation where the Guide thinks he’s getting away with something, and—anyway. Stores and restaurants,” she said abruptly, announcing the next section on the sheet. “In a restaurant, will you order for him or do you want him to order for himself?”

Finally, just after four-thirty, they finished the rules worksheets. 

“We just have one more,” Masden said, and glanced at her watch. “Oh. Well, maybe you can do this last one on your own. We usually do it—we skipped it earlier.” 

The last worksheet had to do with punishments. “Yeah,” Jim said. “We’ll do that later.” 

Masden shook his hand. “I hope you find what we’ve gone over today to be helpful. If you have any questions or problems, or if you want to meet again, just give me a call.”

It would be a cold day in hell before that happened, but Jim just nodded and said, “Okay,” and finally, they were free.

Masden and Tim left the room almost as quickly as they did. Seeing them waiting for the elevator, Jim quickly detoured to the stairs. When they reached the ground floor, Masden was heading through the lobby doors at a brisk trot.

He and Blair followed suit. Once they were safely in the truck, Blair let out a breath and raised his hands like he was conducting an orchestra. “Okay! Can I just say, she had the _least_ of _anybody_ in the _entire room_ to be upset about?”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed.

“I mean, you realize they probably beat the shit out of Tim, when he was here. Her, ‘shall we say, difficult Guide.’ Jesus.” He shook his head. “I mean, okay, she did send him out of the room so he didn’t have to see it, but that’s one time she acted like a fucking human being.”

“She did rip Marks a new one for trying to make us watch that,” Jim added.

“Oh? I missed that.”

“When they were in Dench’s office,” Jim explained, starting up the truck. “She didn’t seem to care that they did it, though, just that they tried to make your Sentinel watch it.” He began backing out of the parking space.

“Yeah. That makes sense. She can empathize as far as seeing that you wouldn’t like seeing your Guide get the shit kicked out of him any more than she’d like seeing hers, but that’s as far as it goes. Do whatever you want to Guides, as long as Sentinels don’t get their feelings hurt.” He lifted his hand and let it drop. “Well, like we were saying the other night, it’s something we can use.”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed. After driving for a few minutes, he asked, “What should we eat? Do you want to stop and get something?”

“I don’t know; you’re not supposed to ask me that until level, what, fourteen?” Blair asked bitterly. “I’m supposed to be on bread and water now, anyway, aren’t I?”

“Chief,” Jim objected. “You know we’re not actually doing that shit.” He did, didn’t he? Jim had figured that went without saying.

“Yeah, I know,” Blair groused. “Yeah, I’m—I don’t know, I can’t think. Let’s just go home.”

“Okay,” Jim agreed. 

At home, Jim quickly called Kas and Angel to let them know they were all right. After that, they tried to have a normal evening, but Blair was tense and angry—or, after the crap they’d been doing all day, Jim couldn’t help thinking, _surly and uncooperative_. Or _defiant_ or _displaying a negative attitude_.

And after the day he’d had, Blair had every right to feel that way—but after Blair sniped at him all through dinner, when Jim asked him, quite nicely, to get his shoes off the sofa, and Blair said, “Oh, right, I guess my feet aren’t allowed on your furniture until level three, right? What about my ass? Is my ass allowed on your sofa?”

At that point Jim came closer than he’d like to admit to understanding how someone might be tempted to—

Well, not knock the attitude right out of him; Jim would never do that, but the idea of sending him to his room until he was prepared to be at least a little bit bearable to be around had definite appeal. Instead he took a deep breath and said, “Could you just take off your shoes, Chief? Or you could put the throw blanket down on the couch and put your feet on that. Whatever. You know how I feel about the couch.”

Blair looked at him pointedly. He didn’t say “make me,” but he didn’t have to; Jim got the message loud and clear. 

Jim reminded himself that it wouldn’t do either of them any good to have a fight right now. He remembered Temas—Angel, he corrected himself—telling him about how disagreements between a Sentinel and Guide could easily get out of hand. One of them had to break the cycle, and at this particular moment, it had better be him.

Angel, if he were here, would doubtless say, _Back the fuck down_. 

The couch was about due for a steam-cleaning anyway. “Okay,” he finally said. “Whatever. You’re the boss, Chief.”

Blair, though, wasn’t ready to graciously accept his surrender. “How come you call me that, anyway?”

“Huh? I don’t know…it’s just a thing.”

“Well did it ever occur to you that maybe I want to be called by my actual name?”

“I….” Honestly, it hadn’t. It took him a moment to realize why. “I kind of figured that if you didn’t like it, you’d say something.”

“Huh,” Blair scoffed.

“Sorry. I’ll stop. I mean, it’s kind of a habit. Just remind me.” 

They stared at the TV in silence for at least ten minutes, before Blair said, “I don’t really mind. About the Chief thing.”

“You sure? I can stop.”

“No, I…sort of like it. You’re right, I’d have said something before if I didn’t.”

“Okay.”

After another ten minutes or so, Blair quietly took off his shoes, edged closer to Jim, and rested his head on his shoulder.

#

The next day was completely normal, as if nothing had ever happened, and G-TAC didn’t exist. They dressed up and went to court, where a man who had committed half a dozen home invasion robberies had a chance to explain himself before being sentenced to ten to twenty years in jail for something he had chosen to do, as opposed to a trait he happened to be born with through no fault of his own.

Back at the station after court, Jim gave him a stack of database searches to do and left him alone, which he appreciated. He knew, intellectually, that Jim wasn’t to blame for how he felt, and had in fact done everything he could to make the whole situation remotely bearable, but at the moment he couldn’t quite make up his mind between loving Jim for protecting him and hating him for…well, exactly what he hated him for was another thing he wasn’t sure of. For being a Sentinel, maybe—for being one of the genetic throwbacks who had Guides thrown to them like meat to a dog because normal people were afraid of them.

Which wasn’t his fault any more than being a Guide was Blair’s, but no one ever said life was fair.

After finishing the searches, he stayed at H’s computer and played solitaire. 

The next few days were pretty much the same. Blair made an effort not to be a complete asshole to Jim, but it was an effort, and he mostly stayed on the other side of the bullpen from Jim at work, and in his own room at home. 

Friday evening, he dropped his bag and jacket by the door, and headed for the kitchen to start dinner, planning to throw together something quick and get the part of the day where he and Jim were forced to interact with each other over with. Jim, though, followed him into the kitchen. “There’s something from G-TAC in the mail, and something from the University, too.” Jim held the Rainier University envelope out to him.

Blair glanced at it. “It’s addressed to you,” he pointed out, and opened the refrigerator. “Grilled cheese sandwiches all right with you?”

“Fine with me,” Jim said. “I thought you were making that Mongolian thing, though.”

“I don’t feel like it. What does G-TAC want?”

Jim opened the envelope. “Masden’s report,” he said, skimming through it. “Excellent progress, one or two disruptive outbursts under distressing circumstances, positive attitude, committed to change, recommends a brief meeting at her office in six months to see how we’re doing. Looks like she bought it.”

Blair tasted bile. “Great.” 

“Hey, this is good news, Chief.”

“I know.” Throwing the package of cheese on the countertop, he leaned over, propping his elbows on the butcher’s block and rested his head in his hands. 

Jim patted him between his shoulder blades. Blair tried not to flinch. “You want me to make the sandwiches?”

He straightened up. “It’s my turn.”

“I know, but….”

“I’ve got it.” He banged a pan onto the stovetop and started slapping the sandwiches together. “Tomato soup with these?”

“Sounds good. I guess I’ll open this, then,” Jim added, picking up the Rainier envelope.

“Okay.” 

While Blair got the sandwiches going and opened a can of soup, Jim opened the letter, glanced over it, and then signed at the bottom. 

“What is it?” Blair finally asked, his curiosity having gotten the better of him.

“Just a form we have to send back,” Jim said evasively.

Yeah, right. Abandoning the dinner preparations, Blair picked up the letter. “Authorization Form,” it said at the top. “As a minor/Guide--” _Guide_ was circled “—permission is required for **Blair Sandburg** to register for classes as a student of Rainier University. Please have the student and the student’s Parent/Guardian/Sentinel--” _Sentinel_ was circled “—sign below and return to the Registrar at….” Jim had already signed. 

“Fuck,” Blair said. Naomi had had to sign one of those when he first registered at Rainier—but he had been sixteen then. 

“It’s no big deal. Just sign it and send it back.”

“I’m not signing that.”

“Blair…”

“I’m an adult; it’s none of your fucking business if I go to school or not, and it’s none of their fucking business whether you approve or not.”

“I know, but since I _do_ , you might as well just send it in.”

“I’m not going to.” He knew he wasn’t being rational—sure, he was colluding with his own oppression, but he’d already done a whole shitload of that earlier in the week. What difference did it make at this point if he signed a damn form?

“Great idea,” Jim said sarcastically. “Then they won’t let you register, and that’ll really show them. Ever hear of cutting off your nose to spite your face, Chief?”

“I’m still not doing it.”

“You realize you’re being stupid.”

“At least I’m not a fucking tool.” He wasn’t entirely sure if he meant to imply that Jim was, or not. The sandwiches were starting to burn; the smell turned his stomach. “Fuck it. I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed.”

#

Jim wasn’t particularly hungry either, but one thing you learned in the military was to eat when you had a chance to eat, and sleep when you had a chance to sleep. He dialed down his sense of taste and ate the overcooked sandwiches, putting the soup in the fridge in case Blair wanted it later. 

He allowed himself until he was finished eating to be honestly pissed-off at Blair for being such a stubborn asshole. He wasn’t sure what Blair had in mind—either just giving up on his plan of finishing his degree, over some stupid form, or raising some kind of fuss over it that would accomplish nothing but drawing down G-TAC’s attention on them. Blair’s tenacity and courage in the face of what he’s suffered was one of the things that Jim admired in him…but the flip side was this sheer, bullheaded stubbornness. 

Jim wanted to tell him just to shut up and cooperate for once, that he was only making life more difficult for himself—but he did recognize that that was the thin end of a wedge that ended with Mr. Dench saying that the brutality G-TAC had inflicted on him was entirely his own fault. He respected Blair’s feeling that he had to draw a line in the sand.

He’d just chosen a fucking stupid place to draw it.

After washing the pan and his soup bowl—there was no point running the dishwasher for just two things—he paced around the main room of the Loft. 

Part of his frustration, he decided, was that his Guide was upset, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Blair could make it easier for him by _not being upset_ , but that wasn’t anything Jim had a right to demand from him.

Morally, anyway. He wondered if the submissive invisibility that was expected of most Guides, and that he found so creepy, was really a backwards way of ensuring that Sentinels didn’t have to deal with their Guides’ feelings. 

Well, if that was the choice, he’d take this. Didn’t mean he had to like it, though. 

Another problem was the claustrophobic way they were left to handle all this stuff on their own. G-TAC and the SRB were supposed to help, of course, but G-TAC was part of the problem, and it wasn’t like anyone at the SRB would understand why he wasn’t handling things G-TAC’s way. He wasn’t a big one for talking about his problems, but for someone like Blair, who was a pretty big talker at the best of times, it might help to have someone who could listen to him and say yeah, you’re not crazy, that does suck.

Oh, right. Kas and Angel. 

Picking up the phone and the card with their numbers on it, Jim returned to the couch and dialed. 

“Temas residence, Kas speaking.”

“Hi. Jim Ellison.”

“Are you guys all right?” Kas asked immediately.

“Yeah—I mean, basically. No new crisis. Blair’s kind of upset.”

“Oh.” He heard Kas moving around on the other end of the phone. “Angel’s at a board meeting. What’s going on?”

“Well.” He sighed. “We got this letter from the university. They need me to sign a permission form for him to go to school.”

“And you’re going to sign it,” Kas said firmly, “so…?”

“Yeah, yeah. Of course I am. He’s just pissed off about it.”

“Oh,” Kas said. 

“He’s been pissy all week,” Jim added. “Since the G-TAC thing.”

“Yeah, that would do it.” He heard Kas drinking something on the other end of the line. “You said that night that you were okay, but…?”

“They didn’t touch him,” Jim said. “Like we agreed. But they got inside his head pretty good, I guess.”

“You know that can be almost as bad.”

“Yeah.” Jim scrubbed his hand over his face. “He’s holding it together pretty well. Maybe too well,” he realized. Jim’s favorite way of dealing with a problem was to bury it and move on, but Blair wasn’t moving on; he seemed trapped in the same place he’d been on Monday night. “Maybe I shouldn’t have taken him in there. I could have fought it, gotten more time.”

“It was his call, and he made it,” Kas reminded him. 

“So’s this thing with his permission form, and he’s making the wrong goddamn call,” Jim said, his anger surfacing again. 

“Well, yeah,” Kas said. 

“What does he think, that if he signs the thing, they win? G-TAC doesn’t want him going to school anyway, so if he doesn’t go, they…win either way,” Jim realized.

“Yeah,” Kas said. “I’m pretty sure that’s the problem.”

“There isn’t any way around it,” Jim continued. “I mean, if he keeps banging his head against every wall they throw in front of him, all he’s going to get is a headache.” That, and G-TAC coming after him for getting blood all over their nice clean wall.

He got up and let himself onto the balcony. “You know what gets me?” Jim finally said. “If he had just _stayed in Spain_ , none of this would be happening. I mean, I’d—well, I wouldn’t miss him, because I wouldn’t know he existed. He said he came back the first time because if he didn’t, he’d be letting them stop him from doing things he wanted to do—there was a dig he wanted to go on, an expedition, something like that.

Kas thought for a moment. “Yeah. It was different for us—Angel and me. We made up our minds we were going to go along with whatever hoops they wanted us to make us jump through to do what we wanted to do.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure what he really wants to do is not jump through any hoops.” 

“Yeah, good luck with that.” Another sound of Kas drinking something. “What about you?”

“Hm?”

“What do you want?”

Jim was brought up short by the question. He wanted what he had. He wanted to do his job and live his life. 

Except none of that was as important as it had been less than three months ago, when he’d heard a Guide—his Guide—asking the man beating him, _is that the best you can do?_

“I just want him to be all right,” Jim finally said. 

“Yeah,” Kas said with a sigh. “I know that one. Medical school was Angel’s thing, but for me it was all about making that little fucker happy. Only it sounds like for Blair what it’s going to take is finding some way G-TAC can’t push him around anymore, and there isn’t one.”

“Yeah. Even being out of the country wasn’t good enough for him before. Maybe another planet.” Or a complete overthrow of the United States government, but various oaths Jim had taken were pretty much against that. 

“Eventually, he’s going to have to decide that something else is more important than not letting G-TAC win,” Kas said. “But that’s not something you can make happen before he’s ready for it.”

Jim knew that was true, but he didn’t like it one bit.

“I can try talking to him, if he feels like it.”

“I’ll find out,” Jim agreed. Even giving Sandburg someone else to be pissy with would at least give him a break. 

He knocked on the wall by Blair’s room. 

“What?” Blair demanded from behind the curtain.

“Kas is on the phone, if you’re taking calls at the moment.”

After a long moment, he heard Blair get up, and then his arm emerged from behind the curtain. Jim put the phone in it. 

Returning to the living room, he put the TV on to give Blair some privacy. 

After about an hour, Blair came out of his room, with the phone in hand. After replacing it on the base, he stood facing Jim, shifting his weight slightly from one foot to the other. “Something on your mind, Chief?” 

“Uh, Kas invited us up to their cottage this weekend. I said we’d go.” 

“Okay,” Jim said, relieved. He’d expected some more momentous piece of news. It would have been nice to be asked before Blair made plans for the both of them, but it wasn’t something he was going to make an issue of, at least not right now. 

“So we can go?”

“Yeah. We have to be at work on Monday, though,” Jim reminded him.

“Yeah, I know.” Blair edged over and sat on the edge of the couch. “I think it’ll be good to, you know, get out of the city for a little bit.”

Jim nodded. “Yeah, maybe.” It was too early in the year for fishing, and too wet for hiking or any other outdoor activities, but he’d spend the weekend on an active volcano if it would help Blair get his head on straight.

“Good. He’s not sure if Angel’s going to want to go; he’s going to call and let us know.” Blair looked away. “I’m, uh, sorry I’ve been kind of an asshole all week.”

“It’s okay,” Jim said. Blair scooted over to him, and Jim pulled him in close. At least he had a little warning this time—on a few occasions this week, the switch from pissed-off-Blair to cuddly-Blair had been fast enough to give him whiplash. “It’s been a shitty week.”

“Yeah,” Blair sighed. 

“Did you pack yet?” Jim asked, running his fingers through the hair that was beginning to curl down over Blair’s collar.

“I threw some clothes and books in a bag,” Blair said. “But I guess we need—I don’t know, sleeping bags? Towels? Food? I didn’t ask.”

“Probably all of those things,” Jim agreed. “We’ll ask when they call back.”

#

“This is way too fucking early to get up on a Saturday. Hell, half the people who are out at this hour are probably still having Friday night,” Angel said, crawling into the back seat of Jim’s truck. After throwing their bags in the back, Kas got in after him. Angel promptly flopped over with his head in Kas’s lap, saying, “Wake me up when we get there,”

“If we get in an accident, you’re going to break your neck,” Kas pointed out.

“Jim better drive carefully, then.”

“Sorry,” Blair said, looking back at them. He hadn’t _quite_ invited himself on this trip, but he had hinted around enough that Kas might have felt like he almost had to invite them.

“He always bitches when we go to the cottage,” Kas said. “It’s practically a tradition. Anyway, nobody said he had to go,” Kas added, poking Angel in the shoulder.

“If I didn’t, you were going to go off and leeeeeeeeeeeeeave me,” Angel answered. 

“I’d have put out enough water and dry food to last you the weekend,” Kas told him.

“Hmph.” Angel pulled Kas’s jacket over his head.

Once they were off the narrow mountain track and back onto a main road, Kas got out a Thermos and started pouring cups of coffee. “We only have two cups, so you’ll have to share,” he told Blair, passing one cup forward. “And we usually stop at the McDonalds that’s about ten more miles up on the left, for egg McMuffins.”

“And the last flush toilets for days, if anyone needs that,” Angel added, sitting up and seizing their coffee cup.

“Thought you were supposed to be asleep,” Jim said, glancing back at him in the rearview mirror.

“I was pretending,” Angel answered. After tossing back about half of the coffee, he pushed the cup back into Kas’s hands and settled in against his shoulder.

“Fasten your seatbelt,” Jim told him.

About an hour past the McDonalds, Kas advised Jim to turn up a narrow dirt road, even more rutted and bumpy than the one that led to their regular house. As they pulled into a farmyard, an older man came out of the barn and approached the truck. 

Kas rolled down his window. “Hey, Hank. Where do you want us to park?”

“Over by the corncrib’ll work. The missus has some things for you to take up to the lodge; she’ll be out in a bit.”

“Okay.” Kas pointed Jim toward the corncrib.

While they were parking the truck, Hank brought the ATVs out of another outbuilding. “They should start up fine for you,” he said. “The boys took them out the other week, to make sure they were still running after the winter.”

“Thanks,” Kas said. “Are they gassed up?”

“Sure are.”

They loaded their supplies onto the machines. Kas had explained the night before that they re-stocked the place every summer, so for this trip they didn’t need to pack much more than their own clothes and toothbrushes. Kas and Angel had brought more than that, though, and getting everything strapped on to the two ATVs was a bit of a challenge. 

They were just about finished when a woman—presumably Hank’s “missus”—came out of the house, carrying a brown paper grocery sack. “Is half a dozen eggs enough?” she asked, handing Kas the bag.

“Plenty,” he said. “We’re just staying the weekend.”

“There’s a pint of milk in there, and some of my banana bread, and a few of the new potatoes.”

“Thanks,” Kas said, handing her a twenty dollar bill. “These are Jim and Blair, by the way. Hank and Estelle Williams.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jim said. Blair nodded along.

Estelle and Kas exchanged family updates for a few minutes, a place was found on one of the ATVs for the bag of groceries, and finally they were on their way, with Kas and Jim driving the two ATVs and Angel and Blair holding on behind them.

Blair had expected “the cottage” to be…well, a cottage. A small cabin, maybe two or three rooms. What it actually turned out to be, however, was a sprawling, one-and-a-half story lodge, with about a mile and a half of porch stretching along the front of the building. 

Shutting off his ATV, Kas said, “Everybody grab some of the stuff.” They all did, and headed up onto the porch. “The first thing we have to do is walk through and check if anything has broken, fallen off, or started leaking during the winter,” he explained as he unlocked the door. “We can give you guys the tour at the same time.”

He showed them a kitchen, equipped with a bottle-gas stove and a woodstove, and two large sitting rooms with back-to-back fireplaces. One sitting room was decorated with taxidermied animal heads and shadowboxes displaying dry flies and other masculine, outdoorsy accoutrements. “They used to call this the gun room,” Kas said. “When I was a kid my sister tried to convince me that the animals came to life and talked at night.” He stuck his head in the fireplace and opened the flue. “That looks fine. Bedrooms are over on the other side of the entrance hall.”

There were about ten bedrooms; Kas pointed out the one that he and Angel used, and invited them to pick any of the others. The bedrooms were all pretty much the same, with either a double bed or two twins, and a small dresser each. “There’s a window broken or something at the end of the hall,” Angel reported.

They all went to check it out. In the last bedroom at the end of the hall, one of the green-painted shutters that covered the window had flapped open, and one windowpane was broken. The mattress of the bed nearest the window was soaked. Kas opened the window and leaned out. “Shutter’s broken,” he said. “We’ll have to wire it shut, and put some cardboard or something over the window.” Turning to Jim and Blair, he added, “It’s always something, with this place. We’d better go up in the attic, too, and check the roof.”

As they to do that, Kas explained, “when my mother and grandmother were kids, the whole family would come up here at the same time. The adults would have the bedrooms downstairs, and they set up dorms for the kids up here, boys on one side, girls on the other.”

They walked through the attic rooms, Kas craning his neck to scan the underside of the roof. 

“Up until about world war two, the women and children would stay pretty much the whole summer. The men had to stay in the city and work, but they’d take turns coming out. When my mom was a kid, they’d only stay two or three weeks, but it would be a huge crowd, five or six sets of aunts and uncles, and about twenty cousins.”

“That must have been a lot of fun,” Blair said. 

“Yeah,” Kas said. “When I was a kid, it was pretty much just us—my parents and my sister. I think my mom only insisted we keep coming up here because it was so much fun when she was growing up—my sister and our dad really hated it. Everything looks okay up here,” he added. “I’d better do something about that window before we get going, though.”

“Going?” Angel asked, looking alarmed.

“Hiking,” Kas told him.

“You didn’t say anything about _hiking_.”

“You don’t have to go,” Kas said. 

“Oh.” Angel slumped against the wall and sighed dramatically. “Good. I’ll stay here. Did he warn you about the hiking?” he asked, looking at Jim and Blair.

“Blair said he’s been having trouble sleeping,” Kas informed him.

“He hasn’t been eating much, either,” Jim added. “Maybe with some exercise and fresh air, you’ll work up an appetite.” He bumped Blair’s shoulder with his. 

“Yeah, it sounds good,” Angel said. “But wait until you’re halfway through a 12-hour forced march and wish you were dead.”

“It’s not really twelve hours, is it?” Blair asked nervously. The hike had seemed like a good idea when Kas suggested it—a little bit of man-versus-nature to take his mind off the fights he couldn’t win. 

“More like six or eight,” Kas told him. “It should be six. It takes longer if you insist on stopping every ten minutes to complain and look at your blisters.”

“I was hoping to develop gangrene,” Angel informed him. “Because if I lost a leg, you wouldn’t be able to make me do it ever again.”

“He used to get really stressed out around exam time in med school,” Kas explained to them. “He’d stop eating and sleeping, and basically live on caffeine and anxiety for two weeks. So I’d bring him out and run him into the ground, until he was ready to sleep like the dead and wake up starving. Works like a charm.”

“I could just prescribe you a sedative,” Angel offered. “It wouldn’t leave you sore for a week afterward.”

“I try to avoid drugs,” Blair said. The hike might be strenuous, but even if it turned out to be as miserable as Angel thought, all he had to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other. It might be refreshing to have a problem that was that simple. “Let’s try Kas’s way first. Jim?”

“I’m game,” Jim told him. “I think I can handle a little hike.”

“Your funeral,” Angel said with a shrug. “While you’re gone I’ll get some rooms fixed up for you and start something for dinner.”

#

Jim thought that the hike Kas led them on would be quite pleasant, if not for the light drizzle and heavy mud. With them, it was a bit of a slog, but not exactly torture. Blair started out in high spirits, pointing out interesting plants and rock formations, and listening to Kas’s explanations of how his great-grandmother and her sisters had had the cottage built around the turn of the century. 

After the first couple of hours, though, the terrain got more challenging, and Blair started to drag. At the top of a steep section of trail, Jim and Kas waited for him to catch up. “Are we sure he’s well enough to do this?” Jim asked.

Kas shrugged. “He’s doing all right. We’ll stop for lunch in about two and a half miles,” he added, patting the knapsack he was carrying. Before they left the cottage, Kas had put together some sandwiches and refilled the coffee thermos. “Once he’s completely worn out, he’ll have to let you take care of him. That’ll be good for him.” 

“I hope so.” Jim had noticed Blair pulling away from him over the past week, and he was mildly disturbed to find himself missing the forced intimacy they’d shared when Blair had still had his casts on and had, well, _needed_ him. 

“It will,” Kas said. “We talked about coming up here just the two of us, and leaving the Sentinels at home, but he thought you should come because things have been weird with you two.”

“Oh,” Jim said. 

“Yeah.”

Blair came into sight. “Hi, guys,” he panted. 

“Hi,” Jim said. “You want to stop for a minute?”

“That’d be good.” He sat gingerly on a nearby rock outcropping. 

Kas passed around bottles of water. “How are you holding up?” he asked Blair.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Pretty sure I’ll sleep tonight.”

“That’s the plan,” Kas said cheerfully.

After a few more minutes, they started walking again. 

After another hour or so of hiking, they reached a small, tumbledown shack. “The old Crawford place,” Kas said. “I have no idea who the Crawfords were, but that’s what my mother always called it. I used to play in there when I was a kid, but Angel claims it could fall down at any second.”

Jim looked at it. “I think he has a point.” He wouldn’t stop Kas if he wanted to go inside, but there were definitely going to be words if Blair had any ideas about exploring that deathtrap.

Fortunately, Kas just said, “There’s a place we can sit down over here.”

He showed them to a reassuringly sturdy-looking pavilion with several rough-hewn wooden benches and a stone fireplace built into one end. There was a pile of firewood next to it, and Kas immediately set about building a small fire.

“What can I do?” Jim asked. 

Kas looked around. “If you can find a downed tree, you can cut some wood to replace what we’re using. There’s an axe in the bag.”

Blair had slumped onto one of the benches, but now raised his head and said gamely, “What about me?”

“You can sit there and rest,” Jim told him.

Kas ignored him and said, “After I get this going, I’ll go get some water, and you can run it through the filter and refill the canteens.”

It sounded like Blair could do that sitting down, so Jim didn’t object. 

It didn’t take Jim long to find a fallen tree. Hacking it into stove lengths with the little hand axe took a little longer—it had been a while since Jim had cut his own firewood—but he soon remembered the knack of it and had a couple of armloads of wood ready to carry back the pavilion. 

“Makes a nice change, not having to do everything myself,” Kas said, handing around the sandwiches. “By this time, Angel’s usually lying on the ground moaning about how he’s going to die if he has to take another step.” 

“How did you get him to do this more than once, if he hates it so much?” Blair wondered.

“I just tell him that if he doesn’t come along, I’m going by myself,” Kas answered. “Then he decides I’m going to fall down, break my leg, and get eaten by a bear.” 

“There are bears?” Blair asked. 

“No,” Kas said, then amended, “not many.” 

“What would Angel do about it if there was a bear?” Jim asked. He didn’t doubt that Angel would be useful in the broken leg part of the scenario, but it was hard to imagine the little Sentinel facing off against a bear. 

Kas shrugged. “If what he does about grasshoppers is any indication, he’d hide behind me and say, ‘Kill it, Kas, kill it!’” He shook his head. “He doesn’t mind spiders, or those awful flying cockroaches they have down in Florida, but grasshoppers freak him right the fuck out. And crickets.” 

“It must be the legs,” Blair said thoughtfully.

“Hm?”

“They both have those legs that stick up in the back,” Blair explained. “They are kind of weird, when you think about it.”

“He says it’s the jumping,” Kas answered. “And the sound grasshoppers make when they chew.”

“I guess that could be kind of freaky,” Blair said. He poked at the fire with a stick. “We should have brought marshmallows.” 

Kas took a bag of marshmallows out of his backpack.

Blair stared at him. “Is that thing magic? I wish I had…a watermelon.”

Kas checked the bag. “Sorry. I do have dry socks and a first aid kit.”

“Watermelon?” Jim asked. “Is that like the goldfish?”

“Kind of.” 

After eating several marshmallows each, they reluctantly doused the fire and got going again. They didn’t backtrack over the ground they had just covered, but Jim noticed that they were heading back in the general direction from which they’d come, and that now they were trending downhill rather than uphill—although the uneven terrain still meant that there were some uphill sections. 

The break had given all of them, and especially Blair, a renewed burst of energy, but it didn’t last. By the time the trout stream came into sight, signaling that they were getting fairly close to the cottage, Jim was more than ready to be done walking, and Blair was literally stumbling over his feet. Kas looked like he was still going strong, but Jim was more than willing to bet that he was putting up a good front.

“How much further is it?” Blair asked, the first time he had spoken for at least an hour.

“About a mile,” Kas said. 

“Oh my God,” Blair groaned. “Jim, if I ever agree to do this again, shoot me.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jim agreed. Hiking the last mile was going to be pretty unpleasant, but if it made Blair feel better, it would be worth it. 

They drank some water and shared out the last snacks from Kas’s knapsack, and pressed on. Jim stayed close to Blair to grab him when he stumbled and help him over fallen logs and other obstacles.

Finally, the roof of the cottage came into sight. There was meat cooking—pork, it smelled like—and something with tomatoes in it. 

Now that they were in sight of their goal, he seemed to have decided to stop being stoic, and was hanging off of Jim’s jacket like a baby monkey. Jim towed him down an embankment, around the side of the cottage, and up onto the porch. 

Blair raised his head and sniffed the air. “Is that food?” he said hopefully. “I’m starving.”

“Great,” Jim said. “That was the plan.”

Inside, Angel was sprawled on one of the couches. Jim steered Blair to the other one and dropped him down onto it. 

“Boy am I glad I stayed home,” Angel said, sitting up and dropping a paperback book onto the end table. When Kas came over and sat on the arm of the couch next to him, Angel leaned into him. 

“When’s dinner?” Kas asked, ruffling his hair.

“Any time,” Angel answered. “It’s in the oven.”

“I’ll just lie here, and you can drop it into my mouth,” Blair suggested. “Is that okay?”

“Come on,” Jim said. “We should wash up.” He hauled Blair back up off the couch. 

#

Blair had thought that he was too tired to eat, but the scent and sight of food revived him, and he devoured the pulled pork and rice with red beans that Angel had cooked. “What did I tell you?” he said to Jim as they were both finishing up their second helpings. The meal was spicier than anything Blair had cooked at home so far, but Jim didn’t seem to be having trouble with it.

“You tell me a lot of things, Chief,” Jim pointed out. “You want to give me a hint?”

“About how there are places where Sentinels don’t live on--”

“—white bread and mayonnaise,” Jim finished for him. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Yes, and Miami is one of them,” Angel said, sounding amused. 

“Are there a lot of Sentinels in your family?” Blair asked, re-energized enough to be curious.

Angel shook his head. “I’m the first one—well, on my mother’s side. All I really know about my father is that when my mother came over with my grandparents, he stayed behind to try to figure out some way to smuggle out some money and valuables. Then he stayed and shacked up with some _puta_ instead. It could be all Sentinels on that side, for all I know.”

“Maybe he was one, and the _puta_ is actually his Guide,” Kas suggested.

“Could be,” Angel said, shrugging. “I think someone would have mentioned it when I turned out to be a Sentinel, but who knows.”

“Were you latent?” Blair asked. Most Sentinels knew what they were from early childhood, but it sounded like Angel was saying he hadn’t.

“No, I had the senses all along, but you know how it is, when you’re a kid—you think everyone is like you. From what I’ve heard, a lot of families figure it out when their child always seems to know what the neighbors are up to. I grew up in an apartment building where half the people who lived there were related to us, and everyone else either played canasta with my grandmother, or worked in my uncle’s factory, or had kids who went to school with me and my cousins, or all three—if I said something about what the neighbors were talking about, or cooking, or whatever, they just assumed I had been over there. I didn’t find out until they tested us in high school.”

“That must have been a shock,” Jim said.

“It was kind of a relief, actually. I had already figured out I was gay by then, and between Catholicism and _machismo_ I didn’t think that would go over real well—but as a Sentinel, I could just turn up with a male Guide and nobody would say anything. I wasn’t crazy about going into the army, but I was less worried about that than coming out to my family.” 

“Until you actually got there,” Kas added.

“Right,” Angel agreed. “But it did work out pretty well,” he added. “My mother and my grandparents love Kas.”

“My parents, on the other hand…” Kas said. “They don’t mind too much that I’m a Guide, or that my Sentinel is a man, but they still aren’t sure why I couldn’t have picked a Sentinel who was ‘our kind of people.’”

“The funny part is that if they’re talking about class, we actually _are_ —my grandfather was a doctor in Cuba, they belonged to a country club and had a butler, for fuck’s sake—but that doesn’t count.” He sighed. “They’re gotten better about it. They’re still convinced I’m Puerto Rican, but--” He shrugged.

At least he wouldn’t have that problem with Naomi, Blair thought. Sure, she was unhappy that he had been captured, but he was pretty sure she would accept Jim, whenever they finally met. 

What about Jim’s family? He had mentioned that his mother was out of the picture, so presumably his father and brother were still around somewhere. Why hadn’t Blair met them yet?

Jim glanced over at him. “I don’t really talk to my father, or my brother. I guess they’ll meet Sandburg eventually.”

Okay, that was weird. “We’ll have to invite Naomi to visit sometime,” he said, instead of commenting on it. “Maybe next time she passes through California.”

“Okay,” Jim agreed. “You going to let her stay in your room, Chief?”

“Sure. I can sleep on the couch.”

Angel and Kas looked at each other significantly. Blair had noticed that they were surprised when he and Jim had put their stuff in separate rooms that morning, too. Did Bonded Sentinels and Guides usually sleep together? He liked sleeping near Jim, but it wasn’t something they did every night—and would Jim want to? Did he?

“Who wants coffee?” Angel asked, standing up.

They all did. Angel made small cups of _café con leche_ with condensed milk, and served it with the banana bread the farmer’s wife had sent with them. They talked a little bit more, mostly about the hike, and how glad Angel was not to have been on it.

“It wasn’t much of a hike,” Jim teased. “More of a stroll, really.”

“Next time we’ll do one of the really tough ones,” Kas answered.

“I’m so glad you have another Special Forces lunatic to play with,” Angel said. “Maybe you’ll stop trying to make me do things outdoors.” 

“It wasn’t that bad,” Blair said. He was sure he would have had a different opinion on the subject an hour ago, but the memory was beginning to fade.

“You won’t be saying that tomorrow,” Angel predicted. “I left some liniment in your room—use it, if you want to be able to move. Have Jim help you with it,” he suggested.

Blair glanced over at Jim, who shrugged. “Sure thing, Chief.”

“And a hot bath,” Angel added. “The hot water heater will stand up to it—that’s one thing I made sure of.”

“What’s it run off of?” Jim wondered. 

They discussed plumbing and other homeowner topics for a while, Blair suggesting that if they systems ever needed to be updated, they replace the generator with solar panels, which would be much more ecologically friendly, not to mention easier in the long run than hauling diesel up there every time they visited.

Before long, though, he was yawning over his coffee, and headed off to take that bath. He decided to take Angel at his word about the generator, and sank into hot water up to his chin. Definitely made a nice change from stand-up showers at the loft—he played around for a few minutes, submerging his limbs and letting them slowly float to the top of the water. 

The kitchen was next to the bathroom, and even with non-enhanced senses, he could hear the others’ voices through the wall. Not quite well enough to make out what they were saying—Jim would have been able to—but enough to tell they were having a good time. 

Growing up the way he had, Blair was pretty used to the way that sharing a couple of meals and working together to face life’s challenges could turn strangers into an almost instant family. But according to the conventional wisdom, the two Sentinels ought to have been, if not actually at each other’s throats, at least circling each other warily. And there was no way Angel ought to have been able to blithely send his Guide off into the woods with what he _should_ have thought of as a rival Sentinel. But if doing so had caused him any stress at all, he had done a damn good job of hiding it. 

In the other room, Jim laughed at something one of the others had said. Blair was glad he’d agreed to come along on this trip—he’d been pretty sure Jim wouldn’t forbid him to go, but he wasn’t sure how well he’d have handled it on his own. The change of scene had done them some good, and so had the hike—given them something simple and achievable to work toward. He had known, all week long, that he and Jim were on the same side, but now he _felt_ it, in a way that he now realized had been missing for most of the week. 

When the water cooled, he hauled himself, dripping, out of the tub. Drying off, he wrapped himself in a bathrobe and went to work on his hair. Now that it was growing out again, it was getting harder to manage. After a few minutes he gave up on it and headed back to his room, comb in hand.

That morning, the bedrooms had been stripped bare, with the mattresses leaning up against the walls. Now the twin beds in his room were neatly made up with colorful quilts and several fluffy pillows each. They had also been pushed together.

Further investigation proved that the old-fashioned washstand had been set up with soap, towels, and—lube. 

He was still holding his last item when Jim tapped at the door and came in. Blushing, Blair said, “Apparently Angel is a little Cuban _yenta_ ,” he said, dropping it back into the drawer.

“Uh-huh,” Jim said, sounding amused. Taking the comb out of Blair’s other hand, he said, “Let me help you with that.”

They sat on one of the beds, and Jim started working the comb through his hair. Jim was very careful, untangling the knots without pulling, and Blair relaxed under his gentle, patient attention. 

“Are you letting this grow out on purpose?” Jim asked after a while.

He started to nod, then thought better of it. “Uh-huh. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, but I like it long.” Just yesterday, he’d have demanded to know if Jim had a problem with that—Jim, he knew, went to the barber religiously every six weeks. “It’ll look neater once it gets long enough to tie back. It’s kind of at an awkward stage right now.” His hair looked okay short or long, but in between he had an unmanageable Jew-fro. Naomi’s hair was straight, so he must have gotten that from his father, whoever he was.

“You don’t say.” 

After combing out the last of the knots, Jim ran his fingers through Blair’s hair, fluffing it. “That feels nice,” Blair said sleepily. 

“This stuff is like a pet,” Jim said, patting his head. “A tribble or something.”

“It doesn’t grow quite _that_ fast,” Blair said. “But you can pet it whenever you want,” he added generously.

“Thanks. Any idea where that liniment Angel was talking about is?”

“Uh-uh.” Unless “liniment” was code for “lube.” 

Jim checked the drawers of the washstand and dresser. “Maybe he put it in my room. Be right back.”

While Jim was away, Blair took the opportunity to get comfy, slipping out of the robe and settling on his stomach with his head on a pillow. The room was a little chilly—brisk mountain air and all that—so he tugged the robe back over himself. 

He was dozing lightly when Jim came back in. “Found it,” he said softly. As he opened the container, Blair caught the familiar, spicy scent of Tiger Balm. 

“Hmm,” Blair said. 

Jim sat at the foot of the bed and started rubbing the salve into his feet and calves. Yes, there were some definite advantages to having a Sentinel of his very own. 

“Lemme try something,” he said after a while. 

“Okay.”

He reached out and found their Bond, the slender thread that tied them together. Imagining it not as a simple thread, but as a cable or a pipe, he widened it. It felt like a working link, but instead of snapping into place, it just gradually grew, like a trickle of water turning into a torrent. 

He’d always experienced the link through tactile metaphors—with the other Sentinels, linking had felt like being smothered, or being coated in some kind of stinking slime. With Jim, though, it was like he was wrapped in a fluffy blanket, or floating in soft water, perfectly body-temperature, so that he couldn’t quite tell where he ended it and where it—where Jim—began.

“That’s…new,” Jim said. 

Blair wanted to ask what it felt like for him, but couldn’t quite find the words. Instead, he just lay there quietly, letting Jim’s hands work the salve into his tired muscles, basking in the love and comfort he felt through their Bond. 

It was like they were floating, he and Jim, in a bubble where nothing could touch them. When Jim finished with his back and turned him over, Blair noticed with a kind of detached amusement that he was hard, his erection bobbing against his belly. He wasn’t the least bit embarrassed—why would he be, when his cock was just as much a part of him as Jim was? 

Jim, too, wore an expression that Blair was sure matched his own—dopey and blissful, eyes at half-mast. After massaging the fronts of Blair’s thighs, he reached for his cock.

That drew Blair just a little bit out of his happy stupor. “Oh, man, you gotta wash your hands first.”

Jim drew back. “Hm?”

“Tiger balm…genitals…not good. There’s some water, over in the thing.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the washstand.

“Oh.”

Blair noticed with detached interest—but not surprise—that when Jim got up off the bed, the link between them stretched, and thinned a bit, but didn’t break with the loss of physical contact. Of course it wouldn’t break—Jim was his Sentinel, whether he was touching him or not. 

Letting his head flop to the side, Blair watched as Jim very carefully washed his hands, twice. “Bring the stuff over, too,” he suggested. 

“You want me to--?”

“Uh-huh.” 

Jim, for a change, didn’t misunderstand, didn’t argue. Maybe they should keep the Bond open like this all the time. Might make it hard to get any work done, but at the moment, he wasn’t sure he cared. Returning to the bed, Jim stretched out alongside him and kissed him, starting at his mouth and working around his jawline to his ear. 

“You gonna keep all these clothes on?” Blair asked, fumbling at one of the buttons on Jim’s shirt.

“Hm?” Jim looked down, seeming surprised to realize he was still fully dressed. “Should I?”

“I don’t know; it’s kind of kinky.” It was definitely interesting, having his naked body pressed up against Jim’s clothed one, but, he decided, that wasn’t what they were going for right now. There were whole parts of Jim that he hadn’t really touched yet—the whole mess with G-TAC had derailed the big plans that he’d had for when he got his casts off. 

He unbuttoned Jim’s shirt, kissing and tasting each new patch of skin as it was revealed, running his fingertips over him, tracing the lines of bone and muscle. When he reached the bottom of the shirt, he moved on to Jim’s jeans, unbuttoning the fly and pushing them and Jim’s underwear down enough that his cock sprang free. Blair sucked it into his mouth in one happy slurp.

“Uh, Chief?”

Blair detached, running his tongue along the underside as he did. “Yeah?”

“If you wanna do that other thing….”

“You in some kind of a hurry?” 

“No, but I’m not exactly a teenager here,” Jim pointed out.

“Didn’t think you were,” Blair said, but moved away from Jim’s cock to concentrate on some of the other newly-uncovered delights. 

#

“Gin,” Kas said, laying down his hand.

“Shit,” Angel said, rearranging the cards in his hand. “I have a handful of nothing here.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

“I’m dealing with an unfair distraction here.”

“I really don’t want to know.”

“Jim and Blair are having sex,” Angel told him. 

“I said I didn’t want to know.”

Angel added up their scores and wrote them down. “Looks like I owe you two-fifty.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Want to take it out in trade?”

“I’m not sure we have that kind of time,” Kas said. “We might just have to do it once, and you can owe me the other two bucks.”

“Oh, that’s cruel.”

“I call ‘em like I see ‘em.” 

“I must be sleeping with you too often,” Angel said. “Glutting the market or something.” He swept up the cards and shuffled them. “Are we doing this, or should I deal?”

“If you want,” Kas said. “But you’d better be on top. I’m kind of tired from hiking, and you could use the exercise.”

“Oh, fine, but that’s going to cost you extra.”

#

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jim thought that he really owed Kas a thank-you note. When he and Blair linked at a crime scene or when reviewing evidence, he had to control himself tightly to focus on the evidence, and guard himself against sinking into his sensory experience of his Guide. Now, though, there was no more pressing matter at hand to distract him from Blair. 

Everything about Blair entranced him. The spicy, musky scent of him; the sight of his skin and hair, glowing in the reflected golden light cast by the nearby oil lamp; the feeling of his firm, wiry muscles under his lightly furred skin; and perhaps most of all, his deep, contented breathing and occasional murmurs of things like, “Oh, yeah, Jim, right there.”

In their previous encounters, he had always worried—despite Blair’s protests—that he might hurt or frighten his little Guide without realizing it. But now he could feel Blair’s pleasure through their Bond, and he knew Blair was enjoying this as much as he was, if not more. 

Blair was on his side, one leg drawn up to his chest, while Jim teased at his opening. 

“You ready?” Jim asked, hesitating.

“Totally,” Blair drawled. 

Jim sank into him. “Okay?” he asked, giving an experimental thrust.

“Oh, yeah.”

Jim wrapped his hand around Blair’s cock, holding him so that each thrust drove Blair into his hand. Pleasure flowed through the link between them, amplified and magnified. Jim wavered on the edge of zoning on it—if Blair wasn’t his Guide, there would be no way he could do this without zoning—but then, if Blair weren’t his Guide, it wouldn’t be this good.

When they finally came, together, he tumbled over the precipice, falling, flying, soaring into a world where there was nothing but pleasure.

“…Jim? Jim, come back to me, man. Listen to my voice. Concentrate on your breathing. In...out…in…”

Jim sucked in a breath, surprised to find that he still had lungs, that he still had all of his parts and wasn’t just a dick, buried in Blair and floating on a river of spunk. “Chief?” he said blearily, sorting out his tongue.

“Yeah,” Blair said, sounding amused. “You with me, man?”

He nodded. “That was…intense.”

“You’re telling me.” Blair squirmed out of his arms; Jim whimpered in protest. “Just a second, buddy—if we fall asleep without cleaning up, we’re gonna wake up glued together. Not fun, trust me. I have a patch on my ass where the hair still hasn’t grown back.”

Trusting Blair was always a good idea, so Jim waited patiently while Blair dampened a towel at the washstand and gave them each a couple of quick swipes with it, before crawling back into bed and tugging the covers over them. 

“That’s better,” Blair sighed, twisting his upper body around to plant a kiss somewhere in the vicinity of Jim’s chin. “Love you.”

“You too.” Once he had settled back down, his back against Jim’s chest, Jim slipped his hand back between Blair’s legs, cupping his soft cock. The other hand he spread flat on Blair’s chest, over his heart. 

“What’re you doin’?” Blair asked sleepily, punctuated by a yawn.

Jim thought for a moment. “Sleeping,” he finally said.

“Oh.” Blair yawned again. “Good idea.”

They slept.

#

Sometime during the night, Jim had apparently turned into an octopus. Well, he still only had four limbs, but he was holding on to Blair with all of them—one arm was across his chest, the other draped over his hip and holding on to his cock like it was a handle. Both of his legs were wrapped around Blair’s, and crossed in front of him. 

“Jim? Hey, man, are you awake?”

Jim mumbled something indistinct and nuzzled his neck.

“Yeah, that’s nice, but I kind of have to pee.” He didn’t like the idea any more than octopus-Jim apparently did—outside of their cocoon of blankets, it was fucking freezing, and the bathroom was a long walk away—but he hadn’t wet the bed in more than twenty years, and if he wanted to keep that streak going, he had to get up soon.

After a little more cajoling, Jim finally unclamped, and he got up. It was, if anything, colder than he had anticipated, and he couldn’t find his robe. It was probably on the bed somewhere, maybe under Jim. Finally he just grabbed Jim’s shirt and wrapped it around himself as he ran for it.

His legs were rubbery and sore; he found himself weaving and wobbling down the hallway, until he hit on the strategy of leaning against the wall. In the bathroom, he sat down gratefully, thinking about how convenient the no-pants thing would have been back in the old hands-less days. 

Convenient, but chilly, not to mention embarrassing. Once he was finished, he limped back to their room as quickly as he could, eager both to get back into the warm bed and to avoid the possibility that Kas or Angel might come out of their room and see him wandering around bare-assed. 

When he crawled back under the covers, Jim said, “Jesus, Chief, you’re freezing,” and wrapped himself back around him, like an animated electric blanket. One of Jim’s hands settled over his crotch, which was especially welcome—his cock had pretty much gone into hiding on the way back from the bathroom. Now it was feeling safe and warm enough to come out and have a look around. Blair sighed contentedly.

“Happy?” Jim asked sleepily.

“Uh-huh.” He was sore and achy, but yeah—happy. 

They dozed for a while—maybe another couple of hours—until Kas tapped at the door and asked if they were getting up for breakfast. 

“Are we?” Jim asked drowsily.

Blair considered. “I could eat.”

“We have a fire going in the kitchen,” Kas added, from the other side of the door.

“I’m sold,” Blair decided. Provided he could find some pants.

He found some, and they made their way to the kitchen, where they were greeted with warmth and coffee. Blair grabbed a cushion from one of the chairs and huddled as close to the wood stove as he could get. He was reminded of the farmhouse they’d lived in when he was eleven—except there, he’d had to compete with a half a dozen dogs and other kids for a prime spot near the source of heat. 

Here, Jim sat behind him, providing him with a backrest and—even more importantly—not getting between him and the fire. 

“You sure look cozy,” Angel said, a little bit wistfully.

Kas left off stirring the eggs long enough to kiss the top of his head. “How many pieces of this bacon do you want?”

“Ooh, at least six.” 

Before too long, Blair had thawed out enough to move to a chair, and Kas was serving up plates of eggs, bacon, and home fries. 

“When do you think we should head out?” Kas asked. “When do you guys have to be back?”

Jim glanced at him. “No particular time—we have work in the morning.”

“I guess we’ll leave after lunch, then.”

“As long as we don’t have to go on another hike,” Blair said. “I’m still sore from the first one.”

“Nobody appreciates my hikes,” Kas said.

“I appreciate it,” Blair assured him. “I’m just sore. I slept great, though.”

“You’re not going to give Jim any of the credit for that?” Angel asked slyly.

Blair ducked his head. They had been quiet—but yeah, Sentinel. There wasn’t such a thing as quiet enough.

After a leisurely breakfast, they cleared the table. “Did you want to have a look at those old photo albums?” Kas asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Blair said eagerly. Kas had mentioned yesterday that he had photo albums and scrapbooks dating back to when the cottage had first been built. Since his own family history began with his birth, he found the idea fascinating. “Maybe I should help with the dishes, though,” he added, glancing over at the sink, where Angel was rinsing them.

“I’ve got it,” Angel said, waving him off. “I’ve seen ‘em.”

Kas ventured out of the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a stack of albums. “I brought the oldest ones,” he explained, “and the most recent one, because you have to see this.” He opened the top album, paging through to the back. “Here. I had Angel’s mother give me this one.”

“They don’t want to see that,” Angel protested.

“But look how adorable you were!”

“Were? Are you saying I’m not now?”

In the picture, Angel was about thirteen, wearing a jacket with lots of braid on it. He had a hat with a feather on it tucked under one arm. “He was in marching band?” Blair asked.

“I played the coronet,” Angel said. “Badly.”

“Here’s us on our first leave,” Kas added, showing them another picture of himself and Angel, posing near a palm tree in their army uniforms. Angel was tucked up against Kas’s side, looking worried. “We spent it in Miami, visiting Angel’s family.” 

“If you’re showing them that, you have to show them the one of you with the frog.”

After they had looked at several of Kas’s most embarrassing childhood photographs, they moved on to the old albums. In the very first album, the builders’ receipts were pasted in next to pictures of the cottage under construction. After that there was page after page of photos of women in long, light-colored dresses, playing croquet, posing on the porch, and perched atop mules. Most of the photos were carefully labeled with the date and occasion, as well as the names of the subjects and the photographer. 

One series was labeled “The Bob Comes to Greenwood Cottage!” and showed each of the women first with her long hair piled on top of her head, then down, and finally cropped into the then newly-fashionable short styles.

“Those first few years, they called it Greenwood,” Kas explained. “After that everybody just called it the cottage, like we do now.”

The pictures showed the first four women growing old, and the children of the time growing up, and eventually appearing with their own spouses and children. 

“That’s my Uncle Will,” Kas said, pointing at one of a row of boys in shorts and sweaters, holding oars and grinning in front of a canoe. “He died at Normandy—he was a Sentinel, supposedly.”

“Supposedly?” Jim asked.

“Yeah, check this out.” Kas flipped forward several pages, until he found a hand-colored eight by ten of a man in army uniform. “What do you think about that?”

They looked. Blair didn’t see anything unusual about it at first, but since Kas’s words suggested there was _something_ , he kept looking. Finally, he decided that the pose was strange—the man was holding his cap over his chest, almost like he was saluting the flag. 

“He has his rank insignia covered up,” Jim said. “That’s…weird.”

“Yeah. We have one other one of him in uniform—this one was _his_ first leave.” The next photo Kas showed them was of two men, standing on the porch of the cottage. “If he was a Sentinel, it would make sense for that to be him and his Guide, right?” 

“Right,” Jim said. “Only that’s a Sentinel with him. And…he’s missing his insignia. I can see the hole where it would have been pinned on.” 

“Yeah, Angel saw that, too. Since there aren’t any other Sentinels anywhere in the family—and one of Great-Grandma’s sisters was a Guide—I’m thinking he was actually a Guide, and they just told people he was a Sentinel.”

Blair nodded. “Yeah, I bet you’re right.” It was the history of Guide repression writ small—Blair wondered how often that happened, that the contributions of Guides were overlooked because people found the whole idea of having one in the family to be faintly embarrassing—if he was a man, anyway.

“Anyway, they’re buried together in France,” Kas added. “I’ve seen a suspiciously-blurry photo of the grave, too, but it’s not here.” 

#

As far as Jim was concerned, there were only so many old family photos you could look at in one sitting—and as far as he was concerned, that number was about ten. Kas and Blair were still going strong after at least a hundred, but fortunately, Angel wasn’t much more interested in them than he was. He dug up a checkers set somewhere, and they played several games while the Guides whiled away the morning with the photo albums. 

Coming here had definitely been a good idea. Jim didn’t know if it had really been Kas’s exercise cure that did the trick, or the change of scene, or a placebo effect—and he didn’t particularly care, either. Blair had eaten heartily and slept well, and now seemed relaxed and happy. Whatever the reason, that was good enough for him. 

Fifteen

“Why do you have to work on such a high floor?” Blair asked as they trudged up the last flight of stairs on the way to Major Crimes. 

“When we were on the ground floor, people kept asking to use our bathroom,” Jim answered, straight faced. 

What a day for the elevator to break down—his legs were still aching from Saturday’s hike, and they had been bouncing in and out of the office all day. “So do you think the ex did it?” he asked, referring to their newest case. A woman’s apartment had been broken into multiple times, and while nothing had been taken, threatening notes and photos were left. The local precinct had kicked it upstairs to Major Crimes this morning, when the woman had come home from a night shift to find a strangled cat on her bed. 

“Probably,” Jim said. They had gone by the ex’s apartment after taking his statement, but he wasn’t home. Since he was without regular employment, they’d had little choice but to plan on stopping back later in hopes of catching him at home. 

“Poor kitty,” Blair said. 

“Yeah, well, let’s hope we find the guy before it’s poor Alice.” 

“You think he’s going to do her next?” Blair asked.

“Maybe not _next_ ,” Jim said. “But it looks like that’s the path he’s on.”

As they trooped into the Major Crimes bullpen, Jim stopped short, and Blair ran straight into his back. “Hey,” he protested. Edging around Jim, Blair saw why he had stopped—Mr. Dench and Lorelei Marks from G-TAC were waiting by their desk. “Oh, shit.”

They just couldn’t catch a fucking break, could they? G-TAC was just going to keep turning up, every time they were starting to get over the last thing they’d done. 

Blair stayed close behind Jim as he stalked over to their desk. “Something I can help you with?” Jim demanded.

Dench stood up, followed a second later by Marks. “Detective Ellison,” he said. “I just wanted to say again how sorry we are for the…incident…at your training session last week. Miss Marks?” he added, giving her a significant look.

Blair tensed, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Marks clenched her jaw and ground out, “I’m sorry, Detective Ellison. I…misjudged…the situation.”

“You sure did.” Jim took a step back and to the side, bringing himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Blair. “But I don’t think I’m the one you owe an apology to,” he said, giving Blair a significant look.

Oh, man. It wasn’t that Blair didn’t appreciate what Jim was trying to do…but didn’t he see that it was just going to piss them off?

Both G-TAC agents stared at them for a moment. Finally Dench said, “Lori, apologize to the Guide.”

She tossed her head and laughed nervously. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am completely serious, Miss Marks,” Dench told her.

Oddly enough, Blair had a pretty good idea what was going through Marks’s head. His trainers had enjoyed making him repeat humiliating things; as often as not, he refused to give them the satisfaction and took a beating instead. Marks, on the other hand, was probably facing nothing worse than another disciplinary letter in her file, if that.

Still, he could practically see her weighing the pros and cons of telling her boss to stick his apology where the sun didn’t shine. 

“We’re waiting,” Mr. Dench said. 

Marks looked vaguely in his direction and said, “Sorry. Guide Sandburg.”

Blair nodded. As apologies went, it was pretty crappy, but he wasn’t going to belabor the point.

“If that’s all,” Jim said, “we have work to do.”

#

“If you had sent Detective Ellison a letter of apology, as we agree you would, that little scene wouldn’t have been necessary,” Mr. Dench lectured her as they walked down the stairs and out of the police station.

Burning with humiliation, Lorelei didn’t answer him. It was bad enough being made to apologize to the Sentinel—but to be forced into humbling herself by apologizing to that little shit Sandburg, that was beyond the pale. 

She had thought that showing them the tapes would be enough to make an impression on them—to teach them that she was the one in charge, and it wasn’t up to them to set terms. But she hadn’t planned on that other Sentinel taking their side. 

She should have. It was a mistake she wouldn’t make again.

She’d make them pay. She wasn’t sure exactly how, yet—but they would pay.

#

“You doing okay, Chief?” Jim asked. Blair was hunched over H’s computer, looking at something on a web site.

“Yeah,” Blair said unconvincingly. “Where do you suppose he got the cat from?”

“The cat?” Jim asked, confused for a moment. 

“It looks like with this kind of thing, it would usually be the victim’s pet,” Blair explained, gesturing at the computer screen, “but she said she’d never seen it before.”

Oh, right, the case. “She was telling the truth,” Jim said. “It didn’t have any of that godawful perfume on its fur.”

“Yeah? What did it smell like?”

“Like a cat,” Jim said. 

“Well, yeah, but anything else? See if you can remember—it might be important.”

Jim closed his eyes and thought back to his examination of the cat’s body. It had smelled mostly, overwhelmingly, like cat, but there was a hint of something else…. “Flea shampoo.”

“Okay! So that means it was somebody’s pet. He didn’t find it in an alley or something.”

“Unless he gave it a bath before he killed it,” Jim said. But yeah, that didn’t seem likely.

Blair snapped his fingers. “You know what? We should check if it has a microchip.”

“The cat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We should check if the _cat_ has a _microchip_ ,” Jim repeated. All of the words made sense individually, but put together in that order, not even close.

“Yeah. See, there’s this company that puts microchips in animals, and you have your name and address on the microchip, so if it gets lost the animal shelter can scan it and get it back to you. Most of the shelters and pet stores in Cascade put them in their animals before they send them home. If this cat had one, we can find out who it belonged to.”

Jim nodded slowly. “And chances are, it belonged to someone the perp knows—a neighbor, relative, something where he’d have access to the cat. Okay, how do we find out if the cat had a microchip?” That still sounded weird, even now that he knew what it meant.

#

“Some people just make me sick. I can’t believe anyone would do that to an innocent little kitty,” the shelter worker said, shaking her head. “I hope you lock him up and throw away the key.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Jim said. “The microchip?” He glanced over his shoulder at Blair. The Guide was currently sticking his fingers into a cage full of kittens. He was probably safe, then. 

“Yes, let me just scan him…poor baby.” She took out a large handheld scanner, like the kind package delivery guys used, and scanned the cat. “Well, he is chipped—let me just look it up.”

Jim stuffed the dead cat back into the evidence bag. 

“The chip is actually registered to us,” the shelter worker reported. “Somebody adopted him from us—from the north side branch, actually—and never changed the chip over.”

“Can you tell me who adopted it?” Jim asked.

“Let me check.” She entered some numbers into her computer. “It’s not in the system—you could go over to the other shelter and ask them to look in their paper records.”

“Thanks. Come on, Chief.” 

He hoped Blair didn’t want a cat. His allergies were mild enough that he could probably adjust having one in the house, but the litter box was a different story. Maybe if they got one of those self-scooping ones…but there were still the chemicals in the litter itself to worry about. 

The balcony, that was the ticket. If he put a cat door in the balcony door…somehow…they could keep the litter box out there. Of course, the days of having a post-work beer on the balcony would be a thing of the past, but if his Guide wanted a cat, that was a sacrifice he’d have to make.

The north side shelter had guinea pigs in the lobby. While Jim gave the cat’s microchip number to the receptionist, Blair wandered over to look at them.

Well, that was a completely different problem. They couldn’t keep a guinea pig on the balcony; the animal would freeze to death. Maybe if they kept it in Blair’s room, and cleaned the cage twice a day….

When the receptionist took the cat’s microchip number into the back to look into it, he joined Blair by the guinea pigs and took a whiff.

No two ways about it, guinea pigs stank. “I think you’d better go with the cat,” Jim said regretfully.

Blair glanced over at him, reaching for the evidence bag in his hand. “Go where with it?”

Jim pulled the evidence bag away from him. “Not that cat,” he explained. “For a pet. See, with a cat we can put the litter box on the balcony, but if you get a guinea pig, the whole house is going to smell like—what are you laughing about?”

“What is it with you trying to give me pets, man?” Blair asked. 

“Well, you keep looking at the animals,” Jim pointed out, defensively.

“Yeah, and if you were questioning dentists, I’d be looking at the posters about gum disease.” He shook his head. “Are you sure _you_ don’t want an animal? If you want to get something, I’ll help you take care of it.”

“I don’t,” Jim said. “I just thought you might want one.”

Blair thumped him on the shoulder. “Well, I already have this big hairless ape that I’m kind of attached to. He keeps me pretty busy.”

Jim played along. “Hairless ape? What are you talking—hey!”

Blair laughed, but quickly put on a straight face when the shelter receptionist came back. “Sorry,” the receptionist said. “I had to check with our director to make sure we wanted to release this information. She said we definitely do—the cat was adopted yesterday, so we think it’s possible that the person who adopted him also….” She trailed off.

Jim nodded. “That’s certainly something we’ll look into.”

“Please let us know—if he did do it, we want to put him on our Do Not Adopt list, to make sure he doesn’t get a chance to abuse another one of our animals.”

“Sure,” Jim agreed, wondering why it was that both of the shelter workers seemed more concerned about the cat than they were about the human victim.

The receptionist handed over the adoption application. 

“Is it the boyfriend?” Blair asked, leaning over his shoulder to look at the paperwork. 

“Yep,” Jim said. “Good job, Chief.” Finding a connection to the ex-boyfriend wasn’t exactly a surprise, but now they had probable cause, instead of just a hunch. 

“All in a day’s work,” Blair said modestly. 

#

“So that was weird,” Blair said as they walked into the loft. “At the station today.”

He wasn’t too surprised that Jim didn’t need to ask what he meant. “Yeah. Dench told her to send us a letter of apology, but I guess when she didn’t do it, he decided to drag her over here and make her do it in person.”

“She was pretty pissed off about it.” 

“Yeah—well, I’m pretty pissed off about that little stunt she pulled.”

Yeah, but the difference was that Jim wasn’t going to try to ruin anyone’s life because he was pissed off. Blair didn’t have the same feeling about Lorelei Marks. “She’s going to keep trying to make trouble for us.”

Jim nodded. “We’ll deal with it.” 

Blair pressed in close to him, and Jim put an arm around him. “Gonna hold you to that,” Blair said.

“You got it.” Jim gave him a last squeeze before pulling away. “My turn to get dinner—do you want steak or chicken?”

“Whichever, but can we have those roasted potatoes? With the olive oil?”

“Sure.” 

Blair went into his room for some books, and brought them back out to sit at the table while Jim cooked. Recent events had him thinking about whether the territoriality of Sentinels was a myth—or at best a culturally learned response—rather than an instinctive trait. The books he had on hand didn’t have much on the subject, but he thought that if he looked closely, he might at least find some references he could track down. 

“I have to get to the library sometime this week,” he said, copying down a citation from the back of one of the books. 

“Yeah? Should we buzz over on our lunch break?”

“I might need more time than that.” He was probably going to have to make some interlibrary loan requests, and do some journal searches. “They’re open late Thursday evenings—I guess I can wait that long.”

“It’s a date,” Jim agreed. 

When Thursday came around, however, they were assigned a new murder case in mid-afternoon. By quitting time, they were finished evaluating the crime scene with Jim’s senses, but their work back at the station was just beginning. 

“I’d better interview the witness first,” Jim said, referring to the person who had found the body. “She’s been cooling her heels for a couple of hours now; she probably wants to go home.”

_They_ weren’t going to be going home for a while—the first few hours of a murder investigation were the most important, and there were a lot of things to do that couldn’t wait until morning—but Blair nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

Jim considered. “I don’t think I need you in the room for the witness interview. You can start putting the crime scene details into ViCAP, or start the background checks on the victim’s family and co-workers.”

“Okay.”

They went off in different directions, Jim heading for the interview room, and Blair for their desk. He stopped short, though, when Jim said, “Hey.”

He turned. “Yeah?”

“You wanted to go to the library today.”

Blair nodded. “Yeah. Maybe we’ll make it over there on the weekend.” Tomorrow would be a washout—the campus library closed early on Fridays, since few college students spent their Friday nights studying. 

“You could go,” Jim offered. “I have to stay, but you’ve already put in a full day’s work.”

Blair hesitated. “By myself?” It wasn’t, quite, that he hadn’t been anywhere without Jim—he went to the bakery on the corner, and they split up sometimes when they were out shopping or doing other errands. But in all of those places, Jim had been within earshot—his, anyway, if not Blair’s.

“Yeah, Chief, by yourself,” Jim said. “If you want to. Rafe and H can do the database work—it’s not actually in your job description; you don’t _have_ to do it if you don’t want to.”

Blair wavered. If he could have, he would have told himself that it would be unfair to run out on Jim while he was still working—but Jim was right, he wasn’t actually _needed_ here. Jim would be doing ordinary detective work, nothing that required his senses. He could make himself useful, but he wouldn’t be doing anything someone else couldn’t do.

If he stayed, it would _mainly_ be because he was scared to go without Jim, and that was just silly—between the ages of 16 and 18, he’d spent roughly half his life in the Rainier library, without suffering anything worse than a paper cut or the occasional stiff neck from falling asleep in a study carrel. 

“Okay,” he finally said. “Yeah, why not.”

“Here.” Jim handed Blair his cell phone. “Take this, and give me a call when you’re done—I have no idea how long I’m going to be stuck here. You have money for a cab?”

He’d been thinking of the bus—cabs hadn’t exactly been in his budget any time before this—but a cab was a better idea. More direct, fewer people. “Yeah, plenty.”

“Have fun, Chief.”

#

Charlie waited, making sure that Sandburg was really alone—earlier in the week, he had made the call to Miss Marks, only to see Ellison come out of the building a few minutes later. She hadn’t been pleased, not at all. Charlie had worried that Ellison would hear her chewing him out, over the phone, from across the street. He’d almost thrown in the towel then—if he hung around outside the police station and Ellison’s apartment building long enough, the Sentinel was bound to spot him eventually, and Charlie didn’t think much of his chances for continued survival at that point. But finding another job was proving more difficult than he’d anticipated, and Marks was paying him a hundred bucks a day for the surveillance job. He couldn’t afford to throw away that kind of money.

Anyway, now Sandburg was getting in a cab by himself. Perfect.

He dialed quickly, keeping one eye on the cab as it eased out into traffic. “Target has been spotted,” he reported. “In a cab heading east from the station.”

“Follow him,” Marks said, as if he wouldn’t have thought of that on his own.

“I am,” he said, pulling out now that the cab had gotten about half a block ahead. 

“Report in when he gets where he’s going.” Marks hung up, and Charlie concentrated on following the cab.

#

“I’m heading out, Jim” Simon said, stopping by his desk. “You might want to think about going home, too. You’ve done all you can for one night.”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed, glancing toward the door. “I’m just waiting for Sandburg to call in—the college library is going to be closing soon; I might as well pick him up on the way home.”

Truthfully, he was surprised he hadn’t heard from Blair before now. He knew the kid could lose track of time in the library, but it had been almost five hours now. And Jim found that he missed him more than he would have expected—it seemed like every five minutes he was turning around to say something to him, only to realize again that he wasn’t there.

“Well, don’t wait too long. I’m going to need you back here bright and early in the morning.”

“Okay,” Jim agreed, absently. “I’ll be here.” As Simon left, he picked up the phone and dialed his cell.

It rang six times, then kicked to voicemail, exactly as it had the other two times Jim had called. (And as, he was sure, it would have done the dozen or so times he _almost_ called but managed to stop himself.) It didn’t mean a thing—Blair would have turned the phone off while he was in the library; there were signs all over the place telling people to do just that. “Blair,” he said into the phone, “It’s about ten thirty—I’m leaving the station. I’m going to swing by the library on my way home and drag you out,” he decided. “You’d better not be sitting at home with the phone turned off,” he added, then disconnected.

Before leaving, he called home, just to check on that possibility. There was no answer, and he hung up without leaving a message.

Over on campus, the library glowed with a warm light, standing out from the dark classroom and office buildings that surrounded it. Jim easily found a parking place in the nearest lot and walked up the pathway to the main entrance, dodging several groups of students who were leaving the library.

“We’re closing in fifteen minutes,” the work-study student at the main desk warned him as he entered.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m just looking for somebody.”

Given that the library was rapidly emptying out, Jim would have thought that finding one smallish anthropologist would be fairly easy, even given the library’s size. Unfortunately, after checking the usual spots—the reference computers, the study carrels near the windows, and the section of the stacks where the anthropology books lived—he failed to turn up more than a trace of his Guide. Jim could tell that Blair _had been_ in all of those places, but he wasn’t in any of them now—and hadn’t been for some time, at least a matter of hours.

With a growing sense of unease, he returned to the main desk, and asked to borrow the phone.

“Sorry, we aren’t supposed to let patrons use the phone. It’s for library business only.”

With a sigh, Jim hauled out his badge. “I’m a Detective with the Cascade PD. I’m trying to track down my Guide. He was here, and now he’s not here.”

Her eyes widened. “Hang on—let me get our security guy to help you.”

Jim waited impatiently while she used the phone to call security. While they waited for the security guard to show up, he did manage to convince her to let him try the phone, but with the same result as before—voicemail.

Did Blair know how to access the voicemail on his phone? Jim wasn’t sure. He’d probably be able to figure it out, eventually, but it was possible he wouldn’t try, since any missed calls were likely to be for Jim, anyway. 

When the square badge showed up—a heavyset man about twenty years Jim’s senior—Jim explained the situation yet again. 

“Oh, him,” the man said, after Jim had described Blair. “He’s fine, sir.”

Relieved, Jim nodded. “He’s fine where?”

“G-TAC picked him up a couple of hours ago. I’m surprised they didn’t contact you.”

“ _What_?” This could not be happening.

“G-TAC,” the guard repeated, taking a step back. “They had a warrant for him and everything.”

“You let G-TAC just waltz in here and _take_ him?”

“Sir, you have to talk to them. They had a warrant,” he said again. 

“Of course they had a warrant,” Jim muttered. Commandeering the library’s phone again, he called first Simon, then Angel and Kas, asking them to meet him at the G-TAC building. He had a feeling he was going to need backup for this. 

#

“Hi, Jim, what’s—oh my God.” Angel gestured Kas over to him, but took off before he could actually get there, racing into the study to grab his emergency bag. “Yeah. Yeah, we’ll be there as soon as we can—we’ll leave in two minutes.”

Clearly some emergency was afoot, so Kas collected his shoes and Angel’s. Without knowing the exact nature of the problem, he wasn’t sure what else to do. 

“Right. Right. Bye.” He hung up and sat down quickly to put on the shoes Kas thrust at him. “G-TAC _stole_ Blair,” Angel said.

“What?”

“He was in the library, by himself, and they just, I don’t know, grabbed him or something. We’re meeting Jim at the G-TAC office.” Standing up, he snapped his fingers. “My address book. We might need to call in some reinforcements.”

“I’ll get it,” Kas said. “Finish tying your shoes.”

They were out the door in just over the promised two minutes. Kas drove down the mountain as quickly as he could, speeding up to well over the limit on every straight section. Angel manned the phone, calling their friends in Washington to see if what G-TAC had done was even legal. 

When they arrived at the G-TAC offices, Kas pulled into a space between Jim’s truck and a big late-model sedan. Jim was prowling up and down the length of the truck, staring at the building as if he hoped to set it on fire with his eyes. “I can’t get in,” he said as soon as Kas and Angel got out of their car. “They’re closed for the day—there have to be some people in there, trainers and security guards, but they aren’t answering the door.”

“Are you okay?” Kas asked.

Jim stared at him. “ _No_. What the hell kind of question is that? They have Blair in there!”

“Okay, yeah, stupid question.” 

Before Kas could decide what to do next, a tall, solid black man got out of the sedan, folding a cell phone. “They aren’t answering the phone, either,” he reported. “H is trying to track down a home number for the director or the caseworker. Simon Banks,” he added to them. “Captain, Cascade PD.”

“Angel,” Angel said. “Uh, Dr. Temas. And this is Kas.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jim said. “Let’s make friends some other time, okay?”

“Sure,” Banks said. “I’m not sure what our next move is here, though, Jim.”

“I’m thinking I’ll throw that rock--” he pointed, “—through that window. Anybody have a better idea?”

“That’ll attract a lot of attention,” Angel reminded him. 

“I’m not sure I care.”

“Jim,” the police captain said. “Are you sure you want to jump straight to breaking and entering? I mean, of course we can’t just leave him there, but maybe there’s just been some kind of…mix-up, or something. We should try going through official channels first—if we just give H and Rafe a little more time, they’ll find that number, and then we can get to the bottom of this.”

“If it was Daryl in there, would you be going on about official channels?” Jim demanded. 

“Are we sure that he’s actually in there?” Kas jumped in. “If we break in here, we’re not going to get another chance if it turns out they have him somewhere else.” Checking would give Banks a little more time to work the “official channels” angle, too. “Let’s go around the building and check all the entrances and exits. If you can detect his scent at any of them, we’ll know for sure that he’s in there. And we can look for a better way to break in,” he added. 

Jim hesitated, then nodded. “Okay.”

“Angel?” Kas asked.

Angel thought for a moment. “I’m not sure I could pick his scent out of a crowd. I’ll keep doing what I was doing,” he added, holding up the phone.

They started with the front entrance. Kas wasn’t too surprised that Jim detected nothing there, or at the side entrance near the employee parking lot. Around the back, though, there was a smaller parking lot, surrounded by an 8-foot chain link fence, where the G-TAC official vehicles were parked. 

Jim examined the gate, which was secured with an electronic lock. Frustrated, he grabbed the gate with both hands and rattled it. “Bolt cutters?” he asked Kas, hopefully.

He shook his head. “Not on me. Up and over?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Kas knelt and boosted him up to the top of the fence. Jim clung there for a moment, then swung over dropped down on the other side. He circled around the parked vehicles, then stopped between a sedan and a panel van, peering closely at the ground. Kas could tell he had picked up a trail, and watched as Jim followed it to the door. He examined the door and its lock, then trotted back to the fence. Inside, there was a picnic table with a coffee-can ashtray, obviously where the employees went for smoke breaks. Jim climbed up on that to get back over the fence. 

“He’s in there,” Jim reported. “They brought him in the gray van, and dragged him in through that door. Unconscious, I think—the scuff marks in the gravel show he wasn’t moving under his own power, but he wasn’t struggling, either.”

They went back around to the front of the building to tell the others what they had learned. Before Jim could report, though, Captain Banks said, “I just had Mr. Dench on the phone. He says they _don’t_ have him.” 

“He’s lying,” Jim said. “He’s in there.”

“Lying, or he doesn’t know,” Angel suggested. “If it was some kind of mistake….”

“The guy at the library said they had a warrant,” Jim said. “How could that be a _mistake_?”

“I…don’t know,” Angel admitted. “I managed to reach one of our friends with the FBI. He says G-TAC could keep him up to 24 hours, but to bring him in without notifying Jim first, they’d need to have the authorization of the regional director. That would be Dench’s boss, a guy named Wallace at the Portland office. Bill’s trying to track him down; he’s going to call back when he knows something.”

“They aren’t keeping him for 24 hours,” Jim said. “I’m going in there. I’ll just go in and grab him, and then we’ll go to Canada, and get the first international flight we can find at the first airport we come to.”

“Yeah,” Angel said. “Okay. What can we do? Is there anything you need from your apartment?”

“Wait,” Kas said. “If you just smash your way in there, you aren’t going to make it out of the building, much less the whole way to the border. All of the doors and windows are alarmed. There has to be some way to get in without being detected, if we stop and think about it for a minute.”

“Right. Right. Okay. The alarm system is probably set up to notify the police—if we go back to the station, we might be able to--”

“Jim,” Simon interrupted, “I can’t help you plan a B&E.”

Kas and both Sentinels stared at him.

“I just can’t,” Simon repeated. “I’ll keep trying to reach someone in charge and get some answers about what’s going on here, and I’ll keep out of your way. That’s the best I can do.”

Jim protested, but the captain held firm, and after taking Angel’s cell number so he could call them if he learned anything, he left. 

“Speaking of planning B&Es,” Angel said, “should we be doing it right in front of the building we’re breaking into?”

#

Blair hung limply in his chains, feigning unconsciousness. 

“Can’t you make him come around?” Marks demanded of the trainer. Blair didn’t recognize him—it was a new one, or one who hadn’t “worked” with him, anyway. 

Twirling his nightstick, he gave her a lazy look. “How, ma’am?”

“I don’t know! Do something.”

“Could hit him again,” the man suggested.

“Fine. Do that.”

Blair managed not to react when the man approached, but grunted when the nightstick slammed into his abdomen. Did unconscious people grunt? He wasn’t sure.

A couple of hours ago, he’d been in the library, minding his own business, when Marks and this clown had turned up and demanded that he come with them. They had tried to claim that Jim had asked them to pick him up, but he knew better than to believe that for a second. He’d made enough of a fuss to attract the attention of the campus security guard.

He hadn’t been any help—after looking over their paperwork, he’d actually helped them escort Blair out—but at least when Jim came looking for him, there would be some kind of a trail to follow. Blair had made a show of cooperating until they were out of the building, then tried to make a run for it. They’d knocked him unconscious, and he’d woken up here. 

The trainer whacked him in the gut a few times before Marks pushed him out of the way. Grabbing a handful of Blair’s hair, she slammed his head into the wall. “Wake up, you little shit.”

Playing possum wasn’t working so well anymore, so he opened his eyes. “Jim is going to fucking kill you,” he pointed out.

“ _Jim_ does not make the rules. Do you want to know who makes the rules? If _Jim_ wants to keep your sorry ass, he’d better learn that I make the goddamn rules. He thinks he can tell me not to touch you?” She backhanded him. “That he can make me _apologize_ to you? Freaks of nature, both of you.”

She was practically frothing at the mouth, pacing up and down beside him and punctuating her remarks with kicks and slaps. 

“You’re completely out of your mind,” Blair realized. He had thought that G-TAC in general was out to get him—and maybe they were—but Lorelei Marks in particular wasn’t firing on all cylinders where he and Jim were concerned. And apparently the crushing humiliation of being made to apologize to them had pushed her right over the edge and into crazyville. 

He wasn’t too surprised when she screeched, “ _I’m_ out of my mind?” and belted him again.

Trying to ignore her, he fumbled around inside his head, looking for the Bond. He had already tried, several times, to use the Bond to communicate with Jim, to no avail. Apparently it didn’t work that way. But he could still use it to feel Jim’s solid, reassuring presence.

This time, though, it was different. He could feel Jim’s anger, underlain with a sharp note of fear, burning at him through the Bond. 

That had to mean that Jim knew what had happened. And if he knew, it was only a matter of time—and probably not very much of it—before Jim came and got him.

So all he had to do was hold it together, and wait for Jim to come. 

Soon.

#

At Angel’s suggestion, they left the G-TAC parking lot and regrouped at the loft. Jim found himself pacing the great room like a caged tiger. His thoughts raced around ahead of him—he had to get Blair, but if he went in and got Blair, he could make things worse, but he had to get Blair….

“Okay,” Angel said. “This is _not a good idea_ , but I’m just going to throw it out there to get us started.”

“What?” Jim said. 

“It’s really not a good idea. I mean, we should not actually do it.” 

“We get it, Ang. What is it?”

“What if we went and got this Dench guy, the one who says Blair isn’t there, and made him take us inside and prove it?”

It wasn’t sounding like such a bad idea so far. “Make him how?”

“That’s the reason it won’t actually work,” Angel explained. “Probably we’d have to threaten to kill him or something. We can’t do that.”

“We can’t?” Jim asked. 

“Not if we don’t want to end up in jail,” Kas said. “And I don’t think we want that.”

Jim considered. If they were in jail, Blair would be with him, and he could protect him. But yeah, it was not ideal. 

But Angel’s suggestion gave him an idea. “Charlie,” Jim said.

“Who?” 

“Blair’s…trainer. The one who did his fingers. He ran out of work the day they had us in—must have thought I was going to kill him or something. I know I can make him help us break in. He’s a coward, and a lot less well connected than Dench. It’ll be pretty safe to threaten him.”

“How are you going to find him?” Kas asked.

“Like this.” Jim picked up the phone and dialed. “H?”

“Jim! Did you find Sandburg yet?”

“I’m still working on it.”

“Anything I can do to help, man, you know you can count on me.”

“Actually, there is. Run this plate for me.” He gave the number, which he’d written down on a slip of paper in his wallet.

H tapped at his computer key board for a few moments. “Looks like the vehicle is registered to a Charles Bedell.”

“What’s the address?”

H read it off. “Did this guy kidnap Sandburg or something?”

“Let’s call him a person of interest for now,” Jim said. 

“You need backup?”

At this point, Jim remembered, H had no idea that this wasn’t legitimate police business. Better to keep him out of it. Glancing over at Kas and Angel, he said, “I think I have some, thanks.”

“All right. Keep us posted, okay? Let us know when the kid’s all right.”

“I will.” He’d send Major Crimes a postcard from wherever they ended up. Hanging up, he turned to Kas and Angel. “I can probably handle this on my own,” he said, truthfully. He wasn’t _completely sure_ he could handle it on his own—but Blair was his Guide, not theirs. He was the only one who _had_ to do this. 

The other two looked at each other for a moment. “We’re in,” Kas said. 

#

Charlie jumped, his heart hammering in his throat. Just the neighbors’ stupid dog, making a racket over nothing. Man, he was on edge—no matter what that psychotic bitch offered him, he was sitting out her next little project. It just wasn’t worth the stress.

At least his part of it was over now—all he’d had to do was sit outside the library until Lorelei and the other sap she had helping her showed up with the official van. He hadn’t even laid a finger on the kid. This time, anyway. 

Shaking his head, he took another sip from the beer he’d treated himself to with the bonus Lorelei had paid him. Definitely not worth it. It was going to take the whole six pack before he settled down.

He had barely finished the thought before something cold pressed against the back of his head. “Put your hands on your head, and get down on the floor.”

Oh, shit.

#

Apart from the neighbor’s yappy little dog being let out at just the wrong moment, the operation went smoothly. After a few minutes of surveillance by Jim and Angel proved that Bedell was alone in the house, they silently broke in the back door, and had their guns trained on Bedell before he realized they were in the building. 

And Bedell started talking before they even had a chance to ask any questions. “I didn’t touch him, I swear to God. It was all that crazy bitch’s idea. She made me do it. She threatened me.”

They let him babble for a while, as Jim cuffed him to a kitchen chair and Kas secured his legs with duct tape. 

“I didn’t want to break his fingers, either,” Bedell said. “That’s why I quit, I knew it was wrong, and I didn’t--”

So quickly that even Kas couldn’t anticipate it, Jim grabbed one of the bound man’s fingers and stretched it back, almost to the breaking point. Bedell screamed. “Don’t lie to me,” Jim said. 

“Okay. Okay,” Bedell said, or sobbed. “What do you want me to do?”

They didn’t have to do much more than loom menacingly to get the whole story out of Bedell—or at least, as much of the story as he knew. Lorelei—AKA, “that psycho bitch”—had paid him to watch them and notify her as soon as Blair left Jim’s side. “I couldn’t find another job, after I quit G-TAC,” he whined. “I really needed the money—I was about to get kicked out of my house! And it was just the surveillance. I didn’t touch him. I swear to God I didn’t lay a finger on him,” he repeated.

“What does she want with him?” Jim demanded. “What’s she going to do with him?”

“I don’t know! She didn’t say, I swear.”

“And you didn’t ask,” Jim said. He reached for Bedell’s finger; the man shrieked. 

Kas glanced over at Angel to see how he was taking this. Not well—he looked a wide-eyed and a little sick. Kas intervened. “You made a big mistake, Charlie,” he said. “ Can I call you Charlie?” Bedell nodded. “But you’re very, very lucky, because we’re going to give you a chance to atone.”

“A-tone?” Bedell hiccupped.

“Yes. You’re going to help us get his Guide back out,” Kas said firmly. “And in return—Jim’s going make the sacrifice of not killing you.”

“If we get Blair back safely,” Jim added. “If not, all bets are off.”

“That sounds fair,” Kas agreed. 

#

It was harder than Jim would have liked to admit not to just tear Charlie Bedell to pieces, now that he had the opportunity. There were all kind of good reasons not to—starting with the fact that killing or maiming the guy _would_ be an extraditable offense from nearly any country he and Blair might want to live in—but he wasn’t exactly operating on logic right now. 

What was stopping him was the knowledge that if he crossed the line, Kas would haul him back over it. Kas wasn’t going to let him take this guy apart—not in front of Angel, anyway, and not if it was anything short of absolutely necessary. 

And it wasn’t even close to necessary—Bedell was just about tripping over himself in his hurry to figure out what they wanted and give it to them.

It turned out that Bedell had quit his job so suddenly that he still had his keycard and uniforms. Jim had planned on dragging him along—using him to get past the building’s security somehow—but they quickly revised that plan. With the keycard, a hostage would only slow them down. Instead, they pumped him for every detail they could get about the building’s layout, security, and staffing. 

According to Bedell, the keycard would get them into just about anywhere on the lower levels, as well as into the building itself. The administrative offices on the upper floors were locked separately—but they shouldn’t need to get in there anyway. There would be at least two security guards, maybe more, depending on how many trainees were in residence at the time. 

The guards, however many of them there were, would be at the security station on sublevel one, watching the rest of the building on closer-circuit TV. Jim quizzed Bedell on the location of the cameras. 

“I’ve done it,” he added, “stayed nights. Nothing much happens—they just have to have so many there, one for every ten trainees, in case there’s a fire. You’re supposed to walk around the building once an hour, but not everybody does it.”

“What do you mean, in case there’s a fire?” Jim asked.

He got the first glimmerings of a plan when Bedell explained even the “regular” trainee Guides—the ones who weren’t being tortured—were locked in their dormitories at night, so there had to be enough guards to unlock the dorm rooms and escort the Guides out of the building.

“Do they do fire drills?”

“Twice a year, yeah. Government regulations. We always took them out into the back parking lot, where it’s fenced in.”

Jim knew that Kas was on the same page as he was when Kas asked, “The ones in the training suites—do they take them out when there’s a fire drill?”

“No—we leave them where they are, if it’s a scheduled drill.”

“The drills are announced?” Jim asked. Damn. 

“To the trainers, yeah. The regular guards don’t know. If there’s anyone down on sublevel three—that’s where we work on the renegades—there has to be a trainer in the building. We’re supposed to—the trainers are supposed to—get them out of the building if there’s a real fire, and the guards just herd the normal trainees out.”

Okay, they could use that. The regular guards wouldn’t be worrying about Blair, since they’d assume—if they even knew he was there—that he was somebody else’s responsibility. The x-factor was whether there would be a trainer there and whether, since he _wouldn’t_ have been told that there was a fire drill scheduled, he’d actually try to get Blair out, or just evacuate himself. If it was just Marks herself, she may or may not know the fire drill procedure; he couldn’t assume anything.

“What are you supposed to do with them—the ‘renegades’—if there’s a real fire? What’s the procedure?”

“I don’t know—I never had to do it. I’m sure they told me, but I don’t remember.”

Bedell was panicking; probably thought Jim would snap his fingers if he didn’t come up with the right answer. Jim stepped back and let Kas play good cop. 

“Take a deep breath,” Kas advised, and it was obscene hearing him use the Guide Voice on this creep. “Think back to the first week you worked there. They probably gave you your locker, and had you watch a sexual harassment video, and told you about the emergency procedures, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, they did,” Bedell agreed, his heart rate slowing. “There was the blood-borne pathogens thing, and the medical emergencies thing, and the procedure for if we’re driving a prisoner and get a flat tire—the vans, that’s it! We’re supposed to take them out into the parking lot and restrain them in the back of the van—that way if the whole building goes up, we can drive the van out of the way.”

After they had gotten everything out of Charlie that they were going to, it was time to leave. The next problem was figuring out a way to make sure he didn’t have a chance to warn anyone that they were coming. Jim was all for knocking him unconscious, but Kas and Angel both argued against it. 

“Brain injuries are unpredictable,” Angel said. “There’s no way to hurt him just enough to buy us a couple of hours without risking permanent harm.”

“I’m okay with risking permanent harm,” Jim told him.

“I’m not,” Angel answered. “Sorry.”

“Can you give him something?” Jim suggested. “A sedative?”

“We’d still be running into Hippocratic Oath problems,” Kas answered. “I don’t think we can do that, either.”

“What if we just leave him tied up?” Angel asked.

“He’s unemployed,” Kas pointed out. “It’s possible he could die of thirst or something before anyone misses him. Will anyone miss you in the next two or three days?” he asked, kicking the leg of the chair they had Bedell tied to.

“I don’t know,” Charlie whined, and Jim could see him trying to work out what answer would give him the best chance of living. “My sister, she comes around sometimes. Not regular or anything. She might.”

In the end, they decided that leaving Bedell tied to the chair was the best they were going to do—he’d just have to make time tomorrow, at some point, to call Simon or H or somebody, and let them know to come untie the sorry bastard before he starved to death. 

Gagging Bedell with a dishrag in his mouth and a strip of tape over it, Jim told the other two to go outside. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Jim,” Angel said warningly.

“I want to make sure the neighbors won’t be able to hear if he screams,” Jim explained. Above the gag, Bedell’s eyes went wide. 

“C’mon, Ang,” Kas said, steering his Sentinel toward the back door, where they’d come in. 

Bedell was trying to talk through the gag—begging, probably. Jim ignored him. He didn’t have anything else Jim wanted. Once the back door shut behind the other two, Jim quickly and efficiently snapped Bedell’s thumb. 

He screamed, but the dishrag did a decent job of muffling the sound. 

“I was here alone,” he told Bedell. “Remember that. There was nobody else here.”

Bedell nodded frantically.

After wiping down everything he could remember Kas or Angel touching, he left.

“Could you hear him?” he asked Kas when he joined them in the truck.

“No,” Kas answered.

“I could,” Angel said. “What did you--”

“Broke his thumb. Just the one,” he added, when Angel started to look dismayed. 

Angel shifted closer to Kas and nodded. “Okay.” 

As Jim drove away, in the general direction of both his place and G-TAC, Kas said, “I think Jim and I should do the actual breaking in. We only have two uniforms, and….” He trailed off, possibly having trouble thinking of a diplomatic way to say that Angel would just be in the way. “And I think you should keep making calls,” he finally said. “Blair doesn’t have a passport, so they’re going to have to ask for refugee status as soon as they get off the plane, wherever they end up.”

He had a point; Jim hadn’t thought that far ahead. Angel nodded. “I could talk to Robert and Jean-Vincent—they’re the ambassadors from France—they should have some ideas.”

“And you could go ahead and send that thing Blair wrote up to his mother,” Jim added. “Do you still have that disk?”

“Yeah,” Kas said. “It’s in the drawer in the hall table,” he added to Angel. “The email address to send it to is right on the label.”

“What if Blair’s injured when you find him?” Angel asked.

“Then I’ll stabilize him and we’ll bring him to the house,” Kas told him. “I really think you’re better off sitting this part out.”

Angel eventually agreed, and they dropped him back on Prospect. Kas got out and walked him to their car, while Jim stayed in the truck to give them at least an illusion of privacy.

“You’ll be safe, won’t you?” Angel asked plaintively.

Kas nodded. “In and out, clean operation. I’ll be home before Letterman comes on.”

#

Marks and the trainer had left him a while ago. For all her scheming, Marks didn’t seem to really have a clear idea of what to do with him now that she had him. He had a feeling he was supposed to be crying and begging for mercy, maybe promising to do anything she wanted if she’d just give him back to Jim—but he had never played by G-TAC’s script before, and saw no reason to start now. 

The trainer had landed one pretty solid blow on his knee. He was trying to keep his weight off of it, but that meant leaning into his restraints, which wasn’t exactly easy on his wrists or shoulders. The knee felt like it was swollen to the size of a pumpkin—he wished he could look at it, or touch it, to reassure himself that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as it felt. 

But after slapping him around and threatening him some more they’d turned out the lights, cranked up the air conditioning, and left him to stew. He really hated being cold—and he wasn’t crazy about the pitch dark, either—but it couldn’t be much longer. He just had to bide his time, wait for Jim. At _worst_ it would only be until morning, when the offices upstairs opened for business. Once Jim was inside the building, he was as good as rescued.

The worst thing was being stretched out against the wall, he decided. If he could curl up, get his arms around himself, he’d feel a lot warmer. Safer, too.

Of course, that was the point. 

Suddenly, a shrill, mechanical shriek cut through the air. After a moment, it resolved into a series of extended beeps. 

The fire alarm. G-TAC had fire drills pretty regularly, and they had scared the shit out of him at first, because when they happened, nobody came to get _him_. He had wondered, in fact, if they did that on purpose—the idea that if he didn’t cooperate, he’d be left to slowly roast to death was more terrifying than anything else they could do to him. 

Now, though—it seemed like an awfully big coincidence that they’d have a fire drill—or an actual fire—on the same night that he’d been abducted. 

When the door to his cell banged open, he thought at first that the figure he saw silhouetted in the red emergency lights was Jim—it stood to reason, didn’t it?

But it was the trainer, the stupid one. Shit. Admittedly, not burning to death had to be counted as a positive in anyone’s book, but it still stung being rescued by the wrong people. 

The trainer snapped one of a set of handcuffs around Blair’s wrist before unfastening the restraint on that side, then did the same on the other side, ending with his hands cuffed behind him. Without the restraints to lean against, and with the trainer yanking him around, he had to put weight on his bad leg. 

Pain took his breath away, and also put paid to any half-formed plan he may have had to take advantage of the distraction to make a run for it—bound hands, nudity, and all, he’d have chanced it, but not with one leg that wouldn’t hold his weight. The trainer had to be planning to make him walk somewhere, and he was about to cry just thinking about it. 

Before that could happen, though, they had company. Seeing another man in G-TAC uniform, the trainer said, “Good, help me get this--”

He shut up quickly when a gun was shoved in his face. “Up against the wall,” Kas said. Switching to a left-handed grip, he restrained the trainer where Blair had so recently been. “Hey, what are you--” he asked.

“Shut up,” Kas suggested, jamming the gun into the trainer’s crotch as he patted the man down.  
He confiscated the man’s radio and quickly smashed it with one foot, then rustled up the handcuff keys. Uncuffing Blair, he asked, “Where can I find something to gag him with?”

“In the cabinet there,” Blair answered, reaching down to examine his knee. It was swollen, yeah, but it wasn’t the huge, throbbing melon that he had imagined. “See if my clothes are in there, too. Is the building actually on fire? Where’s Jim?”

“No, and he’s having a little trouble with the fire alarm,” Kas answered, throwing his clothes at him and gagging the trainer. “So hurry.”

Blair yanked his clothes on, not taking the time to put on his shoes or do up his shirt buttons. Kas supported him as he staggered down the hall. 

They met up with Jim at the stairwell. He had his gun out, and was ostensibly on lookout in case anyone else came down the stairs, but Blair could tell that he was just about zoned on the screeching of the alarm, and the next thing to useless. 

As soon as he got within arm’s reach, Blair grabbed his hand and opened a link. Jim snapped back into focus. “Chief! Are you okay?”

“Yeah. What--”

“Come on,” Kas interrupted, leading the way up the stairs. 

#

Foolishly, once Blair’s hand was in his, Jim thought the rescue was pretty much over. As they ran up the stairs, he was focused on his Guide, drowning his senses in him after the long drought, trying to assure himself that Blair really was okay.

When they reached the ground floor, Jim was already mentally two steps ahead, thinking about whether they’d need to stop over at the Temases’ house for medical treatment, or if they could just drop Kas somewhere and point the truck north. They burst through a side door, out into the night air, and—

\--straight into a trap. A squad of men in G-TAC uniform—but looking much more serious than the guards they’d evaded so far—surrounded the truck. “ _Drop your weapons!_ ” One of them shouted, as each of them took aim at one of the three of them. “Put your hands in the air!”

Kas glanced over at him. Jim nodded slightly. They couldn’t shoot their way out of this, not if any of them were to have any kind of a future. He dropped his gun, and raised his hands. Kas did the same. 

Shit. 

#

The cell they were shuffled into was much nicer than the one Blair had just left. It had two sets of bunks, made up with actual sheets and blankets, and a small bathroom with a toilet and sink. Blair took the opportunity to use these, before sitting on one of the lower bunks next to Jim. Kas was seated on the other bunk, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“Are you okay?” Jim asked, looking at Blair with an expression of concern.

He nodded. “A little banged up, wrenched my knee pretty good. Nothing big.” Nothing life-threatening, anyway. 

He wasn’t surprised that Jim insisted on checking him over, hissing and muttering curses as he uncovered Blair’s new array of bruises and abrasions. As soon as he was finished, Kas performed his own exam, palpating Blair’s abdomen and checking his pupils. Both agreed that he seemed essentially okay, although the knee was a problem. 

“Any idea what happens now?” he asked, curling into Jim’s side. 

Jim considered. “No,” he admitted. “Kas?”

Kas shook his head. “How much have we done that’s actually illegal?”

They talked about that, in the process filling Blair in on what they had been up to since his abduction. 

“Breaking and entering,” Jim said glumly, summing up what they had done at his former trainer’s house. “Unlawful restraint. Aggravated assault—you and Angel are off the hook for that one,” he added to Kas. 

“Once we were inside the building, I disabled the security cameras in the areas we’d need to use, and Kas set off the fire alarms,” Jim explained. “To keep the security guards busy evacuating the building. The plan was that Kas would keep watch, and I’d get you, but….”

Blair nodded. “You had trouble with the alarm.”

“I put the trainer that was in there in the restraints they had Blair in,” Kas added. “So that’s another count of unlawful restraint, I guess.”

“Plus another count of breaking and entering,” Jim said. “And the fire alarm, that’s probably…malicious mischief, or else making a false report.” 

“It doesn’t sound that bad,” Kas said. “Not compared to kidnapping and torture, anyway.”

“Right, but G-TAC’s _allowed_ to kidnap me,” Blair said glumly. 

“Simon’s looking into that part of it,” Jim told him. “There’s a procedure they’re supposed to follow, and it looks like maybe it wasn’t followed.”

“Great. So somebody’s going to get _reprimanded_.” He wondered, for a moment, why Jim hadn’t waited for Simon to _finish_ looking into “that part of it.” But of course he wouldn’t have. With the benefit of hindsight, it might have been better if he had—but Jim had no way of knowing what kind of shape Blair would be in by then. Neither did Blair, for that matter—things hadn’t gotten too bad by the time the cavalry arrived, but that could have changed at any time. He changed the subject. “What’s going on now? What can you hear outside the room?”

He held out his hand and Jim took it, forming a link. “There are people in the rooms next to us. Sleeping. Eight—no, seven. Four on that side, three on that side,” he said, pointing. “And one at the end of the hall who’s awake. Must be the guard—yeah, I just heard his radio. The guy on the other end said, ‘is everything quiet down there?’ and he said, ‘yeah.’”

Kas was nodding. “We’re in the dorm, where the Guides stay during their initial training.”

“Can you extend your hearing any further out?” Blair asked.

“I can try.” Jim closed his eyes. “Some people talking, a few floors up, but I can’t tell what they’re saying. It’s four or five people—two women and two or three men. One of them might be Marks; I’m not sure. A fax machine. Police car siren, but that’s a couple of blocks away.” He opened his eyes again. “Nothing helpful.”

Kas unfolded himself from his bunk and examined the door. “Looks pretty solid, and the mechanism for the electronic lock is on the other side. But the hinges are on this side.” He pried experimentally at one of them. “We could probably get out of this room if we really tried—we’d have to figure out something to use as a screwdriver—but I’m not sure it would do us any good.” 

“Probably not,” Jim agreed. “The guards might usually be pretty complacent, but not tonight.” 

Returning to the opposite bunk, Kas stretched out on it. “Is it safe to assume you want the first watch?”

“Yes,” Jim said. 

“Okay.” Kas closed his eyes. 

“He’s going to _sleep_?” Blair asked. It didn’t seem like the time.

“Yeah. You should too,” Jim added. “At least try. Nothing else to do now, and later you might wish you had.” 

Blair was pretty sure there was no way he could fall asleep, between his throbbing knee and his anxiety about what was going to happen next, but to humor Jim, he put his head down and got under the covers. Jim sat at the end of the bunk, his back to the wall, one hand wrapped reassuringly around Blair’s ankle. He did his best to rest, breathing steadily and concentrating on the steady rush of air in and out of his lungs, carefully not thinking about the events of the last few hours, or about what might be coming next. Jim was here, he was safe.

He wasn’t sure how much later it was when Jim said, “Somebody’s coming.”

Kas got up instantly. “Who?”

“I don’t know. Three people, one of them’s--”

Then Blair could hear the voice, and he knew that Kas could, too. “Where are you taking me? I want my Guide. Do you hear me? _I want my fucking Guide_.” The door opened, and Angel Temas was shoved inside, the door quickly slammed behind him. He staggered a few steps from the shove, then sorted himself out. “Kas?” he said in a small voice.

The big Guide quickly folded his Sentinel into his arms. Angel slumped against him, his shoulders shaking, as Kas murmured to him softly. Kas eased him back onto the bunk, settling Angel against his shoulder. After a while, Angel asked, “What are they going to do to us?”

Kas shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked over at Blair and Jim.

“I don’t know either,” Jim said. 

“Me neither,” Blair agreed. It couldn’t possibly be good. They couldn’t separate him and Jim, or Angel and Kas—not permanently, anyway—but other than that, he had no idea. 

“Simon knows where we are,” Jim said. “Sort of. I mean, officially he couldn’t know, but he knows. You know? So we can’t just disappear. He’ll keep working on figuring out where we went and what’s happening to us.”

“Um,” Angel said. 

Everyone looked at him.

“Remember how we agreed I should send Blair’s account to his mother’s email address?” Angel asked nervously.

“You what?” Blair demanded.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, Chief,” Jim said quickly. “We couldn’t exactly ask you, and…well, that was what it was _for_ , in case you disappeared.”

“Yeah,” Blair said, trying not to imagine Naomi opening _that_. Oh, God. “Yeah.”

“Before I say anything else, let me remind you that I didn’t have a lot of time to think things through,” Angel said. 

_Oh, God_. “What did you do?” Blair asked.

“Well, I was working on it when I heard them coming—I had the file attached, and I was writing out an email to send with it, with what happened today, and what you and Jim were doing. I could hear them coming up the driveway, and I knew it wasn’t Jim’s truck, so I started typing in something about that.”

“And?” Kas asked, tightening his arm around Angel.

“And then when they knocked the door in, I sent it to my entire address book.” 

Everyone was silent for a moment. “Your entire address book,” Jim said in a funny, flat voice. “Who is that, exactly?”

“All of our friends…work…my family, Kas’s family…I don’t know, everybody. I didn’t have time to pick and choose, and I wanted to make sure somebody knew what was happening.”

“Probably a few hundred people,” Kas said. “Plus Blair’s mom, if her address was already on there.”

“It was.”

So hundreds of people, including his mom, were going to wake up and check their email, and find his first-person account of a year and a half of torture. Jim patted him.

“Is that bad?” Angel asked timidly.

“Well….” Kas said. “I think maybe it’s good. Ish. They can’t just lock us up somewhere and hope nobody notices we’re gone.”

“They also can’t just let us go and pretend nothing ever happened,” Jim said, “but I don’t think that was too likely anyway. Yeah, I think we’re better off.” 

Blair had to agree. When he’d written that thing, he had imagined that someday it would come to light. He had hoped that day would be a long way off, and that he’d be able to control how it was released—but he had wanted to make G-TAC’s abuses known. For a certain value of “wanted,” anyway. He wasn’t wild about people he knew—people he would, God willing, have to look in the face again someday—knowing all the details, but it wasn’t _his_ secret to be ashamed of. “Okay,” he told Angel. “Yeah. It’s okay.” 

They pooled their knowledge in an effort to come to some idea of what would happen next, or something they could do to improve the situation, but Angel wasn’t able to add much. The guards who had picked him up had been SRB, Sentinel Recruitment Board. They had ignored all of his questions, telling him nothing more than, “You have to come with us, Sentinel Temas.” 

“I didn’t even know where they were taking me until I saw the building,” Angel added, his voice shaking. “It was scary.”

“I bet,” Kas said, patting him. “You feel up to having a look at Blair’s knee? It’s twisted or something.”

Blair doubted that having his knee examined yet again would do him any good, but he recognized that Kas was trying to distract Angel by giving him something to do. Angel was working hard at holding back panic, and letting him slip over that edge wouldn’t improve the situation one bit. 

Angel sniffled and pulled himself together. Sliding out of Kas’s arms, he scooted over to kneel in front of Blair. “Okay. It’s this knee, obviously,” he said, helping Blair roll up his pant leg. “What happened to it?”

“It kind of got—hit with a truncheon,” Blair said, hoping the answer wouldn’t freak Angel out even more. “It kind of crunched.”

Angel nodded. “This is—probably going to hurt,” he said, hovering one hand over the injury.

“Okay,” Blair said, swallowing hard and taking Jim’s hand. 

Angel tilted his head forward, and Kas put one hand on the back of his neck. It didn’t _exactly_ hurt, when Angel’s fingers probed gently at his knee. It felt like it was _about_ to, at any second, but Angel was using the absolute minimum amount of pressure, barely touching him at all. Blair was just starting to relax when Angel said, “Okay,” and did _something_ that did hurt. A lot. 

He gasped. “Oh, fuck.”

“Yeah,” Angel said, getting up and rubbing between his shoulder blades. “Breathe. I’m done. It’s okay.” Once Blair had caught his breath, he explained, “I don’t think anything’s broken, but one of the ligaments that holds your kneecap in place is either torn or badly stretched. Normally I’d put you on painkillers, give you a brace to immobilize it, and tell you to stay off it for a few days, and then we’ll evaluate you for surgery.” He looked around the room. “As it is, stay off it.” 

Blair would have been able to figure out that much for himself, but he just said, “Thanks.”

“Oh, wait a second.” Angel popped into the bathroom. “There aren’t any towels or anything in here—what can we soak to make a compress?”

“Pillowcase,” Kas suggested, taking one of the thin, hard pillows out of its cheap cotton case. 

“Perfect.” Angel soaked it in cold water from the sink, wrung it out, and wrapped it around Blair’s leg. 

It didn’t help much, but Blair thanked him anyway. 

After that, Kas and Jim tried to get him and Angel to lie down again, while they kept watch. “Are you insane?” Angel asked. “We’re being held prisoner by a corrupt government organization, and your solution is to take a fucking _nap_?”

“Ang,” Kas said gently. “You know how you get when you haven’t slept. And chances are, nothing’s going to happen until morning—the people with the authority to decide what happens to us are too high up to be woken up in the middle of the night for something like this. But once things do start happening, we could be in for a long day. You might as well at least rest while you can.”

Angel scrubbed his hands over his face and laughed hollowly. “Yeah. It makes sense, but…”

“Just lie down,” Kas told him, pushing him back onto the bunk. “And close your eyes.” He took off his jacket and draped it over his Sentinel, pulling the blanket up over it. 

“You should try to sleep, too,” Jim said to Kas. “I’ve got it.”

Kas picked up Angel’s hand and looked at his wristwatch—the guards had confiscated all of theirs, along with their weapons, phones, wallets, keys, and shoes, but had left Angel his, for some reason. “It’s three,” he said. “This place opens at what, eight? Wake me in two and a half hours and I’ll take watch.”

Jim agreed to that, but Blair had a feeling he was lying through his teeth. Kas, instead of taking one of the empty top bunks, squeezed himself in with Angel. Blair let himself be tucked in again, and tried to rest. 

#

The ticking of Angel’s watch was loud in the quiet room. Jim wondered how he could stand it. Most Sentinels and Guides used digital watches.

Angel was matching his breathing to Kas’s. Or maybe the other way around, but he was pretty sure Kas was asleep. Funny—Blair did that, too. Maybe it was something they taught Guides to do. 

Blair wasn’t quite asleep, but he was doing a good job of pretending. Jim squeezed his ankle reassuringly. Hell of a mess they were in now. He felt a little less panicked now that Blair was in his sight, now that he knew he wasn’t being hurt right now—but they weren’t any better off, really. 

Across the room, Angel stirred. “Jim?” he said, too quietly for normal human ears.

“Yeah?” Jim answered, the same way. 

“We’re completely fucked, aren’t we?”

Jim didn’t have a new answer for him—it wasn’t like they were trying to put on a brave face for the Guides. Or like he had a plan he was keeping secret for some reason. “Yeah, I think so.”

“D’you think they’re going to….”

“I don’t know,” Jim said patiently. He wouldn’t know, even if Angel did finish the thought. “Go to sleep.”

“I’m supposed to do an ACL repair in about six hours.”

Jim knew what Angel was really saying—that things like this weren’t supposed to happen to someone like him; he had a real life and an important job—but he just said, “Pretty sure you’re going to miss it.”

“Yeah.” He shifted on the bunk.

Without really waking up, Kas patted his hip and said, “Go’t’sleep.”

Angel went back to pretending to be asleep. 

For the next two hours, Jim sat, listening to Angel’s watch and to the guard at the end of the hall occasionally telling his radio that everything was quiet, and turning over their problems in his mind, not coming up with any ideas. 

When Angel’s watch ticked over to five-thirty, Jim thought about waking Kas up to take the second watch. It was pretty much pointless, since he was, as far as Jim could tell, the only one actually sleeping. Then he imagined Blair pointing out that Kas was an Army Ranger, just like Jim was, and that Jim coming over all chivalrous because he was also a Guide was frankly insulting. 

They really didn’t need to have that argument, on top of everything else that was going on. Jim went over and shook Kas awake. Wordlessly, Kas sat up, settling at the end of their bunk with Angel’s head in his lap. Jim climbed up to the top bunk on their side of the room and pretended he was asleep.

Two hours later, the room exploded—or seemed to. He must have been half-asleep; he woke up suddenly, a sharp metallic clanging ringing in his ears. By the time he woke completely, he was already on his feet and facing the door. “What the _fuck_?” Angel said, taking the words out of Jim’s mouth.

“They’re waking up the Guides in the other rooms,” Kas said. “That’s all. It’s morning.”

Jim checked on Blair. He was breathing hard, his heart hammering, but he nodded and said, “I’m okay.” 

Since they were all awake now, they took turns in the bathroom. There wasn’t much they could do in there—there was no toothpaste, no razors, nothing but a single hotel-sized bar of soap—but rinsing his mouth out and splashing some water on his face made Jim feel marginally more ready for the day, at least.

Blair’s knee was worse—the bruise was turning all kind of colors, and he could barely put weight on it. Shaking his head, Angel fixed another cold compress. “This really needs to be seen to, today. If we can get you an anti-inflammatory shot, it’ll help keep it from getting worse.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Blair said sourly. 

They sat back down on the bunks and waited. Angel glanced at his watch, on average, once every ninety seconds. After the fiftieth or sixtieth time, Jim asked, “Why do you wear a watch that ticks, anyway? Doesn’t it get on your nerves?”

Angel looked startled. “I like it,” he said, covering his watch protectively with his hand.

“He’s had it a long time,” Kas explained. “He finds it soothing.”

Jim decided he’d better not say anything else about it, then, unless it started really driving him crazy. If this was Angel soothed, he didn’t want to see the alternative. 

“Somebody’s coming,” Angel said after a while.

Jim heard it too. “It could just be one of the Guides coming back.”

Kas shook his head. “Trainees wouldn’t be allowed back in the dorm during the day.”

“So what do we--”

The door banged open. Three guards were standing outside, two of them with drawn handguns, the third with…four white Styrofoam takeout boxes. The other two raised their guns as the third took one step inside the cell. He put down the boxes, and backed out. The door slammed and locked behind them.

Jim sniffed. Reconstituted scrambled eggs, white toast, margarine, and orange slices. Breakfast. 

Kas cautiously opened the top box, then handed the others around. 

“So not what I was expecting,” Blair said, looking at his. 

Jim took a tiny, experimental bite of each item. It was tasteless crap, but not actually poisoned or drugged or anything. “It’s fine. Eat it.” 

Blair picked up his plastic fork and shoveled the eggs down mechanically. Jim followed suit, concentrating on not tasting what he was eating. 

“Ang, try to eat,” Kas said. 

“I’m not hungry,” Angel said, closing the box on his breakfast.

“I know you’re not. Eat it anyway.” 

“I might be sick.” 

Kas was unmoved. “Start with the toast.” 

They ate. Or Angel played with a piece of toast and looked miserable while the rest of them ate. 

“I guess I wasn’t missing much all those times I was here and they didn’t feed me,” Blair said.

“When I was here, the days it wasn’t powdered eggs it was cream of wheat,” Kas said, poking Angel. “So count your blessings.”

“I think these are worse than army eggs,” Angel said, picking up a tiny morsel of egg and moving it in the general direction of his mouth. 

“About the same,” Jim disagreed. “Probably from the same factory, actually. But in the army they give you salt and pepper.”

“And Tabasco sauce, if you’re lucky,” Angel said, nodding.

“Or if you make your Guide give it to you out of his MREs,” Kas said. “You want to try actually putting that in your mouth?”

“Not really.” 

“Allow me to rephrase,” Kas said. 

It took the better part of an hour of constant coaxing, cajoling, and the occasional logical appeal for Angel to eat his orange slices, most of the toast, and a few bites of the eggs. Jim wondered what the hell was wrong with him. 

He glanced over at Blair, wondering if it was common for Sentinels to have trouble eating. Blair shrugged slightly in answer. 

It was vaguely embarrassing to watch, but there was absolutely nothing else in the room that he could even pretend to be paying attention to instead. Blair was tracing patterns into the top of his Styrofoam box with the fork, but Jim had already put his in the bathroom, to get away from the smell. Finally, he climbed back up to his bunk and started counting the holes in the acoustical ceiling tiles.

#

Michelle came out of the bathroom after her shower, toweling her hair. “Did the phone ring while I was in there?” she asked Tim, who was fixing breakfast.

“Yes.” He put the spatula down and dried his hands. “It was Carrie.” Carrie was another Sentinel, a friend of Michelle’s from their Navy days. She worked in Washington now, something in the government. “She says, ‘Check your email.’”

“What for?” she frowned. 

“That’s all she said. Well, first she said, ‘Has she read it yet?’”

“Read what?”

“I asked that, and she said ‘Never mind, just tell her to check her email.’”

Michelle shook her head. “All right, I guess I’ll go…check my email.”

“Do you want breakfast in your study?” Tim asked. 

“Yes, thanks.” 

Tim finished cooking Michelle’s buckwheat pancakes, and arranged them on a tray with fresh melon and little bowls of butter and syrup. When the coffee was done, he carried everything in to Michelle in the small office off the living room.

She acknowledged him with a glance. She looked pale, unless that was just the glow from the computer screen. “Get out my blue suit, if you don’t mind. We have to go to the Cascade office.”

“We do?” Michelle had been making an effort to avoid the Cascade office since their training session with the Ellisons; he was fairly sure they didn’t have any appointments there for weeks ahead. 

“Yes. I want to leave in ten minutes.”

Contenting himself with the knowledge that whatever was going on, if it affected him in any way he’d find out about it sooner or later, Tim hurried to lay out Michelle’s clothes and grab a quick breakfast for himself. He normally ate what Michelle ate, but he hated buckwheat pancakes, and usually ate leftovers or something instead on the days when she asked him to make them. 

They were out the door in ten minutes precisely, although Michelle was still carrying her earrings and mascara in one hand. 

“Some kind of emergency?” Tim risked asking, once they were on the road. 

“You could say that,” Michelle said, glancing over at him. “You remember Jim Ellison and Blair?”

He nodded. It would be hard to forget. 

“I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. Actually, can you check my messages at the office?” She fumbled behind the driver’s seat for her purse. 

Tim got it for her. “Your cell phone?”

“Yes.” He dialed in to her voicemail and put the phone on speaker so she could hear her messages. There were two, but evidently neither was the one she was expecting. “Save that one, too. Damn, I don’t know why I wasn’t called—they’re my clients.” 

His curiosity was piqued now. When Michelle didn’t elaborate, he said, “Something happened to Sentinel Ellison and Blair?”

“Evidently. Carrie forwarded me this email—apparently every Sentinel in DC got it, just about. Basically it says that last night G-TAC took Blair Ellison—it called him Blair Sandburg—into custody without notifying his Sentinel, and that Jim was breaking in to the building to get him out.”

Tim didn’t know what to say. Apart from _good for him_ , but things had been all right between him and Michelle for a while now, and he really didn’t want to go back to the way things were when they _weren’t_ okay. He kept his mouth shut. 

“There was a file attached that was supposedly written by Blair, an account of his, ah, his training. If it’s true—it’s probably not. Some kind of hoax.” 

Tim nodded, thinking that it probably wasn’t. Michelle didn’t have a very strong stomach when it came to Guide training—that was why she had developed her own system, based on the methods used with disturbed children, and why she worked so tirelessly to show other Sentinels that there was a viable alternative to beatings. She only knew the sanitized version of his own training that was in his official file; he had figured out pretty quickly that there was no point in telling her about the rest of it. She meant well, but—well, better just to leave it at that. She meant well.

“But if they did take Blair in, Ellison will be frantic, even if the rest of it isn’t true. If he did break in to get Blair back—well, it would be hard to blame him. That tape was—Lorelei should never have made him watch that tape.”

Just before the on-ramp to the expressway, they stopped at a red light. Michelle took the opportunity to put on her earrings and apply mascara. “Check my planner—I might have a home number for Ellison.”

He checked both the address book section and the jumble of business cards and slips of paper that were tucked between the pages of Michelle’s planner. “I don’t see it.”

“Try directory assistance.” 

He tried that. “Unlisted,” he reported back. “I could call Sally and ask her for the number,” he suggested, referring to Director Dench’s secretary. 

“No, I—I don’t want to give them a chance to tell me not to come in,” she admitted. “If this really did happen, there needs to be someone in the room who can understand what Jim’s going through. But Mr. Dench might not feel that way. Lorelei definitely won’t.”

Tim nodded agreement. What Jim was going through was no picnic, he admitted to himself—but he wondered if anyone in the room would have any idea what _Blair_ was going through. Apart from him, and he knew better than to say a word about it. 

When they arrived at the G-TAC office in Cascade, their IDs were checked much more thoroughly than they ever had been before. The security guard even examined his, rather than just checking Michelle’s and taking her word for it that he was her Guide. Something definitely _had_ happened. 

They took the elevator upstairs to Mr. Dench’s office. “Is he in?” Michelle asked Sally.

“He’s in a meeting.”

“If it’s about Jim and Blair Ellison, that’s the meeting I’m looking for.”

“Oh! Sorry, nobody gave me a list—this whole situation has everybody at sixes and sevens. They’re in the big conference room, at the end of the hall.”

When they got down to the conference room, he saw Michelle hesitate in the doorway. Mr. Dench was there, but _not_ Lorelei, and the rest of the room was packed with uniforms—G-TAC, SRB, and regular Army. 

Still, she stepped inside the conference room, and shut the door behind her. “Miss Masden,” Director Dench said. “I’m…not sure we were expecting you.” He looked around the room, as if expecting someone else to take responsibility for her.

Michelle smiled icily. “In all the confusion, I don’t think anyone has gotten around to contacting me officially yet, but as soon as I saw the email, I came straight here. Sentinel Ellison is my client, after all.” 

“Miss Masden’s perspective may be useful,” one of the other men said. After a moment’s thought, Tim recognized him as the G-TAC’s regional director. “Please, have a seat.”

Michelle sat down, and Tim took up a position behind her.

“Perhaps we’d better start by bringing you up to speed,” Mr. Dench said. “If all you’ve seen is that awful email.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Michelle said.

“First off, it wasn’t _us_ who ‘abducted’ Sandburg last night. It was Miss Marks, acting without authorization. She’s being evaluated by a psychiatrist.” 

Tim could feel Michelle’s shock. “Then…he was, actually abducted. If she didn’t have authorization to take him into custody.”

The men looked around the room at each other. “That’s true,” the Regional Director said. “Harry,” he told Mr. Dench, “Next time Captain Banks calls, tell him he can have her. That should keep him out of our hair for a while.”

Dench nodded. “Yes, sir. Now, if Sentinel Ellison had done the sensible thing and waited until morning, we’d have been able to return his Guide to him with an apology. But instead he broke in to the building—he obtained an access card from a former employee, somehow. He even managed to get another Sentinel’s Guide to help him—the other Sentinel was the one who broadcast the famous email.”

“Captain Banks contacted my office at some point during the night,” the Regional Director added, picking up the story. “They dispatched some guard reinforcements to assess the situation. They caught Ellison and the two Guides as they were on their way out.”

“If they had been five minutes later,” one of the SRB men added, “Ellison and Sandburg would be out of the country, and we could sweep the whole thing under the rug by making just enough noise about extradition to keep them in hiding. But now we’ve got them, and we have to do something with them.” 

“Ellison can’t be held legally responsible for the break-in,” Michelle said. “He would have been frantic—his Guide was very badly injured when he was last in G-TAC custody. He was on the edge of panic during our entire training session a couple of weeks ago.”

“We’ve already established that there can be no criminal charges,” the Regional Director said. “Criminal charges would mean a trial, and that would give Ellison and Sandburg a bully pulpit to continue this—crusade they seem to be on against our work here.”

“I don’t understand,” Michelle said. “What is there to decide, then?”

“We also can’t just let them go,” Mr. Dench answered. “All the major networks and a dozen newspapers have already gotten copies of the email and have contacted us for comment. If we want to make this story go away, we have to make sure the press doesn’t have access to Ellison, Sandburg, and the other two.” 

Michelle seemed surprised by that, as if she somehow hadn’t noticed that G-TAC didn’t care much about Guides’ civil liberties. Maybe it was just that there were two Sentinels involved now, too. Tim could have told her—if she asked—that they wouldn’t just let all four of them go.

“Temas and Temas,” one of the Army officers said. Tim wasn’t completely familiar with reading Army brass, since Michelle had been Navy, but Tim thought he was the lowest-ranking kind of General. “Captain Temas was a doctor stationed at Walter Reed. Lieutenant Temas was a Ranger, then he hooked up with Temas and became a nurse.”

Tim puzzled over that. If Lieutenant Temas was the Sentinel, then his Guide had outranked him. If not, then the Guide was an Army Ranger—and even Navy SEALs admitted that Army Rangers weren’t complete pussies. Neither one seemed particularly likely. 

The General continued, “Major Ellison was a Ranger, too. Sandburg, I don’t have anything about. Did he serve?”

“Conscientious objector,” Mr. Dench supplied.

“Oh,” the General said. “What I’m thinking of might not work, then.”

“What’s your idea?” the Regional Director asked.

“Rangers are not infrequently deployed for covert ops,” the General explained. 

“We can’t send them on a suicide mission,” the Regional Director said. Even Tim was shocked that his mind had gone straight there. “That would be overkill—no pun intended—at this point.”

“No,” the General said. “No, nothing like that. But there would be plenty of precedent for sending two Rangers on the kind of operation that might arise without much warning, and take them to some remote location, out of reach of the press, for weeks or months at a time. And any employers, relatives, or members of the press that come looking for them could simply be told that the details of their mission are classified. As far as Captain Temas goes—we can come up with some explanation. It doesn’t have to make a lot of sense, really. The conscientious objector is a bigger problem.”

#

“Are you all right?” Blair asked Angel, leaning over the side of their bunk to watch Jim. Kas and Jim were taking turns doing push-ups in the narrow space between the bunks, and he and Angel had retreated to the upper bunks to stay out of their way. It was Jim’s turn now, and he’d taken his shirt off. Blair was doing his best to appreciate the view. 

Angel glanced over at him. “Hm?”

“Are you sick or something?”

“Oh. No, I just have trouble eating when I’m upset. And sleeping when I’m upset. And doing just about anything else when I’m upset. Kas knows how to take care of me.” 

“It’s not a Sentinel thing,” Kas added. “It’s just him. Not anything you have to learn.” Stepping past Jim, he cupped Angel’s cheek with his hand. “You feel better now that you’ve eaten, don’t you?”

Angel groaned. “Oh, kind of.” 

“Yes, you do.” 

“Oh, go do some push-ups,” Angel said. 

“I think we’re doing crunches now,” Kas said. “Want to hold my feet?”

“Hold your own feet,” Angel groused, but rolled off the bunk. 

After Kas and Jim had done all the exercises they could think of, they all settled back on the bunks, Angel curled up halfway in Kas’s lap again. Blair leaned up against Jim, too. When in Rome….

He thought that Jim and Angel were silent, but after a few moments, he noticed that their lips were moving slightly. “Hey,” he said, and poked Jim with his elbow. “You two want to share with the rest of the class?”

Jim looked guilty. “No?”

“Jim’s worried about you,” Angel explained. 

“I think we’re all in the same boat here,” Blair pointed out. That didn’t mean Jim couldn’t worry, but he should worry about all of them.

“He’s wondering why you aren’t freaking out,” Angel said. 

Oh. “I did that earlier.” He’d had a few minutes of blind panic when he’d come around in the training cell, but it had burned away quickly. Now he was _worried_ —but he wasn’t terrified. Jim was here. Whatever happened next, they’d handle it. 

“I told him, it’s pretty normal to be able to stay calm during a crisis, and freak out later, when things are basically safe,” Angel said. “The crash’ll be fun. But it probably won’t happen until this is over. Whatever this is.”

Blair nodded. “I could have told you that. I’m okay. For now.” 

Jim squeezed his upper arm. “Yeah. You’re okay.” 

He left the “for now” unspoken. 

“What time is it?” Jim asked after a while.

Angel checked his watch. “Almost ten.” 

“We’re due in the OR in ten minutes,” Kas said. “We’re going to be late.”

“I wonder if they’ll cancel, or if Stevens will take it.”

“Did you get anywhere on the new murder case?” Blair asked Jim.

“Ruled a lot of things out,” Jim answered. “Nothing in ViCAP, nothing in the background checks, nothing in the forensics. The PM was supposed to be at nine, so we already missed that, but I wasn’t expecting any surprises. I was hoping for something useful from the ballistics.”

“Who died?” Angel asked, not sounding particularly interested. 

“Some guy.” Jim shrugged. “White male, mid-thirties. Fingerprints in the system from a job-related background check. I forget his name. Robert something. What’s yours?”

“Torn ACL—anterior cruciate ligament, it’s in the knee. Sixteen-year-old girl; she did it cheerleading. Or playing field hockey. One of those.” 

“I think it was lacrosse,” Kas said. 

“It was something where they wear the little skirts,” Angel argued.

“I think that was a fashion statement, not a uniform.”

“Okay. Maybe it was lacrosse then.”

Not too much later, their three guards came back. Blair wondered about the number—which of the four of them did G-TAC think wasn’t a threat? 

Maybe they figured one each for Jim and Kas, and one for him and Angel. He could live with that. 

“On your feet,” one of the guards said. 

Glancing around at each other, they all slowly got up. Angel, surprisingly, was the first to speak. “He needs medical attention,” he said, gesturing at Blair. 

The guard looked past him and gestured with his gun. “Move out. Single file, no touching.”

“He has a serious leg injury,” Angel pressed on. “If he puts any weight on it, it could get a lot worse.” 

The guard ignored him. 

Moving closer to the guard, Angel said, “I’m a medical doctor, and I’m telling you--”

The guard raised his weapon. “Sir, I have to ask you to step back.”

Angel blinked at the gun, which was inches from his face, then raised one hand and batted it out of the way. “Blair is my patient. If you’re taking us to see your superior, Blair’s Sentinel and my Guide will help him. If not, we’ll wait here while you _get_ your superior. Or I suppose you could shoot all four of us, but I imagine that might get you into a little trouble. Your decision.”

Apparently Angel couldn’t face reconstituted eggs without crying, but he was perfectly all right with being threatened with guns. Okay then.

Eventually, the guards decided that it would be acceptable for Jim and Kas to help him limp to wherever they were being taken. They were led down the hall and to an elevator—which was a tight fit since the guards had definite ideas about how much of a personal space bubble they were entitled to—and ended up in the same small conference room where he and Jim had had their “training.” Two of the guards went in with them and took up positions on either side of the door. 

Inside, two men in military uniforms, and one civilian, were sitting around the table. Blair heard Angel say softly “Oh _fuck_.”

One of the military guys said, “Major Ellison, Captain Temas, in the vital interests of national security you are hereby recalled to active duty in the United States Army, effective immediately. You will report to Fort Lewis and await further orders.”

“What happened?” Jim said, belatedly adding, “sir?”

The guy just repeated, “You will report to Fort Lewis and await further orders.”

“You can’t do this,” Angel said, sounding near tears. “I’m a doctor. I have a _job_. This is insane.”

“Captain Temas, I am well aware that you are a doctor; the Army paid for your medical training. As I’m sure you are aware, you can be recalled to active duty at any time. I assure you, we _can_ do this.” 

Before he could say anything else, the other military guy jumped in, “Lieutenant Temas, in the vital interests of national security, you are hereby recalled to active duty in the United States Army, effective immediately.” 

Nothing had been said yet about Blair, and he was starting to get nervous. It was almost a relief when the second military guy continued, “Guide Ellison--”

That didn’t stop him from saying, “Sandburg.” Shit.

“Pardon me?”

Well, it wasn’t like he could back down now. “My last name. It’s Sandburg.”

“If you’re Bonded to Major Ellison, then as far as the United States Army is concerned, your name is Guide Ellison. If you are not Bonded to Major Ellison, then the United States Army has no business with you, and you will be reassigned elsewhere when Major Ellison reports for duty. Taking these facts into consideration, _what_ is your name?”

Blair took several deep breaths and reminded himself that this would be a _really bad time_ for a Kunta Kinte moment. If they took Jim off somewhere without him, there was a decent chance they would both die before anyone had time to investigate whether they really were Bonded or not. Finally he muttered, “I guess you can call me Ellison, then, if it means that much to you.”

The G-TAC trainers would not have accepted that answer, not when complete capitulation was what they were after. But the Army guy either didn’t notice the circumlocution or didn’t care; he just said, “Fine, then. Guide Ellison, you will accompany your Sentinel as a civilian contractor. You will be subject to all military regulations and procedures during this period of active service. You are not permitted to refuse this assignment.”

“Okay then,” Blair said, trying for casual and missing by quite a bit. 

The civilian then said, “Guards, escort them to--”

Before he could finish, Angel left off clutching Kas and whimpering long enough to repeat his spiel about Blair’s need for medical attention. 

The three men at the table gave each other embarrassed looks for a while, until finally the first military guy said, “There is an infirmary in this installation?”

“Yes, of course,” said the civilian. 

“Then send them there. We’ll get the trainees loaded up while we’re waiting for them.”

So they were detoured down to the G-TAC infirmary. Blair had been there a few times before, although not for anything as trivial as a knee he couldn’t put weight on. The G-TAC doctor was a brusque man whose interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath must have been, to say the least, idiosyncratic—for example, he had no difficulty stitching up a profusely bleeding head wound while completely ignoring that his patient was also sporting several cracked ribs and an advanced case of malnutrition. When he approached them, Angel said, “Oh fuck no,” and set about doing his own examination. 

Without any advanced imaging equipment, he couldn’t do much more than what he had already done, but he was now able to give Blair a shot of painkiller, a knee brace, and crutches. The G-TAC doctor complained halfheartedly about having these taken out of his budget; Jim grimly said, “Bill me.” He didn’t add, _if you have the balls_ , but Blair was pretty sure he didn’t have to say it out loud for Mengele over there to get the message.

Before they left, Angel dug out some pain pills, “For the road. We’ll have to get some more at--” He faltered for the first time since going into doctor-mode. “When we get there.”

Kas squeezed his shoulder. “Want me to make this guy prescribe you a valium?” he asked, indicating the G-TAC doctor.

“We don’t stock anything like that.” 

“Of course you don’t,” Angel muttered. 

The guards marched them back to the elevator and out to the lobby, where they were handed over to the military guys. The two officers they had seen before were now accompanied by several regular soldiers—enlisted men, Blair guessed you’d call them—who, like today’s G-TAC guards, were also carrying guns. 

It was funny how much scarier guns were when he knew Jim didn’t have one too. 

Jim tried again to ask why they were being recalled to active duty. He seemed—unbelievably to Blair—to think that it must be some gigantic coincidence, that maybe a war had been declared or some small and vulnerable country was in need of rescue just at the moment when G-TAC and the SRB would be most anxious to get rid of them.

The officers just kept repeating that they’d be given further orders at Fort Lewis, and finally Angel said, “Christ, Jim, are you that fucking thick? _Nothing happened._ The country does not need us. We. Are. Being. Punished.”

Jim looked betrayed. “Is that true?” he asked, looking at the officers like he expected them to deny it, and like he’d believe them if they did.

The officers didn’t answer. The four of them were loaded into the back of a truck—Blair’s mind dredged up the term “personnel carrier” from somewhere—along with two of the enlisted men, who took the seats nearest the doors. Three kids in Guide uniforms, two boys and a girl, were already in there. Blair half expected that they would be handcuffed or something, but once everyone was seated, one of the soldiers thumped on the ceiling, and they started moving. 

Or “moved out,” Blair supposed. He’d have to get Jim to teach him the lingo. If the Army planned to do anything with them other than stick them in a cell and forget about them.

“Where is this place?” he asked Jim after a few minutes. “Do you know?”

“It’s a few hours away,” Jim told him. “We might as well get comfortable.”

Angel, who had gone back to whimpering, tried to curl up with his head in Kas’s lap. 

“Sir,” the soldier nearest them said to Kas, “I have to ask you to ask your Guide to remain seated while this vehicle is in motion.”

“He’s my Sentinel, actually,” Kas said. 

“And I’m a captain,” Angel said into Kas’s jacket. “And you’re a—not a captain.”

“Private first class,” Kas supplied in an undertone.

“Right. So I outrank you. And so does Kas, for that matter.”

Blair would have bet that the soldier was trying not to think about that. It had to be a little awkward transporting three superior officers who were sort-of-but-not-exactly prisoners. Now the private looked distinctly nervous, and Blair didn’t think sharing an enclosed metal box with a nervous and heavily-armed man who was young enough that his testosterone probably still at times overwhelmed his common sense was particularly safe. The kid probably had orders covering what to do if they tried to escape, but not what to do if they were just not particularly cooperative. If he decided that disobeying him was more or less the same thing as escaping, things could get ugly fast.

Maybe Jim thought so too. “And I outrank everybody in here. Angel, one sudden stop will snap your neck and save the Army a lot of trouble. Sit up.”

Blair wondered just what he was planning to do if Angel didn’t, but he did, putting his head on Kas’s shoulder instead. 

“Thanks,” Jim said, settling back in his seat. 

“I don’t wanna be in the Army again,” Angel said petulantly. “I hated it the first time.”

“I know,” Kas said. 

Jim said, “If they are,” he floundered, “punishing us, they’ll just assign you to work in a hospital somewhere. It won’t be that different from what you’re doing now.”

“Except I can’t live in my own house. Or sleep in my own bed. Or drive my own car. Or--”

“Yeah, we get it,” Jim said.

“It’s a good thing we never got a dog,” Angel continued. “It would starve to death. Poor dog. The Army hates me. They want to kill my dog.”

“You don’t have a dog,” Kas said patiently. 

“But if I did, they would let it die.”

“They have to tell the hospital where we are—or tell them something, anyway,” Kas pointed out. “Someone from work would go to our house and get the dog so it doesn’t die. If we had a dog.”

“My sourdough starter is going to die,” Angel said mournfully. “All those innocent yeasts. Slaughtered.”

“That’s probably true,” Kas allowed. “But to be fair, you do slaughter millions of innocent yeasts every time you make bread.” 

“It’s not the same.”

The sad thing was the Blair was pretty sure Angel wasn’t trying to be funny. “Good thing we didn’t get that goldfish,” he told Jim. 

Jim nodded. 

“Look on the bright side,” Kas was saying. “They can’t make you do boot camp again.”

“They better not,” Angel sniffed.

“You’re an officer. They can’t.”

“I am not doing any push-ups. If they try to make me, they’ll have to shoot me.”

“It’s very unlikely that they would. And they wouldn’t shoot you; they’d court-martial you.”

“Do you have to do push-ups when you’re court-martialed?”

“No.”

“Okay then.” 

The Guide kids had been watching them wide-eyed since they’d gotten in the truck; now the girl raised her hand. “Um, sir?”

It wasn’t clear which of them she was talking to. Finally Kas said, “Yeah?”

“Is it really that bad? Basic training? We’re on our way there,” she explained, motioning to the other two kids. 

“It’s not that bad,” Kas said. “He just hated it.” He gave Angel a shake. “See? Stop carrying on; you’re scaring the Guides.” 

That actually seemed to work, a little bit—Angel was still clinging to Kas, but he stopped whimpering and moaning. 

“Coming from G-TAC, you’ve already got a head start,” Kas added. “A lot of the others will have spent the last few weeks getting in all the partying they can before they report for basic. Did you guys go through, uh, just the regular program at G-TAC?”

They all nodded.

“Basic isn’t that different, except there’s more physical conditioning. Running, marching, those push-ups this one was complaining about,” he added, patting Angel.

“What do they expect you to be able to do?” one of the boys asked.

Kas explained, in quite a bit of detail. Blair was gladder than ever that G-TAC had given him conscientious objector status—he’d kept himself in pretty good shape before, but after enjoying months of G-TAC’s hospitality, he wouldn’t have had a chance in hell of surviving the regimen Kas was describing. 

“Whatever you do, don’t stop when you just think you can’t go on much longer. You have to keep going until you reach muscle fatigue—you really can’t take another step. If you stop too early, they just make you do push-ups.” 

“Which is _completely fucking insane_ ,” Angel added. “If the problem is that you’re tired, how is making you do more exercises supposed to help?”

“The point is that you learn you can do more than you thought you could,” Kas said. “I’ve told you that a hundred times.”

“I still think it’s stupid,” Angel sulked.

“Are the drill sergeants really like in the movies?” the other boy asked.

“Pretty much, yeah. But if you did G-TAC first, the discipline at basic is a breeze. Just do your best and don’t panic. For the first three weeks or so, screwing up, being yelled at, and having to do pushups is just part of your day. You get used to it. The same rules apply to you as to the volunteer recruits—they can’t beat you, they have to feed you three times a day, they have to let you sleep, they have to give you medical care if you get hurt. You might be scared and unhappy at Basic, but nothing is really going to happen to you.”

The kids exchanged worried glances. “Does G-TAC actually do that?” one of the guys asked. “I mean, you hear about it….”

Blair spoke up for the first time. “Yeah. They do.” 

He didn’t really want to talk about it, so he was glad when Kas steered the conversation back toward the original topic. “Yeah. But you don’t have to worry about that, unless the Army sends you back, which isn’t going to happen as long as you’re trying. The way it works is that G-TAC assigns each service a certain number of Guides, based on the number of Sentinels they have. If they send you back, they don’t get a replacement. The worst that’ll realistically happen to you is that they’ll make you start over. We know all about it because it took Angel three tries.”

“Is it the same for Guides as Sentinels, though?” Blair asked. From his observations, the SRB wasn’t nearly as tough on Sentinels as G-TAC was on Guides.

“In Basic? Yeah. Apart from Basic, Sentinels get a lot of special treatment you don’t get, but it’s actually a lot more common for Guides to have trouble in Basic. If there’s one of the tests you just can’t pass, they’ll waive it. They make you _really, really_ work at it first, so don’t think you can just get out of stuff—getting something waived is a lot harder than actually doing it, if you _can_ do it. If you have a nervous breakdown, they’ll get you some help—if it’s really bad, they might even give you a nice Sentinel or an older Guide to help you through your second or third try.”

Angel nodded. “My third time I got Kas.” 

“Right,” Kas said. “I think he might be the only Sentinel they ever did that with, but they got the idea because that’s something they do with Guides. That’s not something you should try to have happen, either—you have to be in really bad shape.”

“What about the guns?” the girl asked. “Is that scary?”

“Terrifying,” Angel answered with a shudder.

“I thought it was fun,” Kas said.

“So did I,” Jim spoke up. “Loud, though.” 

“Everything’s loud,” Angel said. “They make you sleep in this room with fifty other people. It’s never quiet, everything stinks, the food tastes like chemicals. It’s unbearable.”

“They aren’t Sentinels,” Kas reminded him. “I mean, sleeping in a room with fifty other people is a pain in the ass, yeah, and I always thought they shouldn’t make Sentinels do that. For Guides, the hard thing is when everyone around you is homesick, or pissed off, or scared—you start to feel it. When you have a choice, spend your time with the people who are doing their best to stay positive. It’s fine to talk about it when you’re struggling or be a sympathetic ear when somebody else is; it helps to know you’re not the only one having trouble, but don’t get sucked in to somebody else’s death spiral.”

“If there’s a Sentinel in your platoon,” Jim said, taking an interest in the conversation now, “they’re not responsible for you, and you’re not responsible for them, any more than anybody else in the platoon, even though the rest of your platoon will probably think you should be. Basic is hard for Sentinels, and we don’t do Sentinel School until afterwards. But all you have to do for him, or her, is—what did you call it, Chief? With the brain waves?”

“Passively emitting brain waves that Sentinels find soothing?” Blair asked.

“Right, that,” Jim said. “They put Sentinels and Guides in the same training units for exactly that reason. But it’s not an actual Sentinel-Guide relationship. They tell the Sentinels that; I don’t know about the Guides.”

“I think they do,” Kas agreed. “But sometimes you can feel drawn to the people who are having the most trouble—you want to help them. Especially a Sentinel, but it can happen with anybody. But unless you’re actually assigned to Guide somebody through basic—and you won’t be when you’re doing your own basic—it’s _not your job_. You have enough to do carrying your own load.”

“You know, the question she asked was about guns,” Blair pointed out. He had to admit he had some worries about that part. He hoped that as a “civilian contractor” he wouldn’t be expected to have anything to do with them.

Kas shrugged. “It’s not like we’re on a tight schedule. The guns are fine. You’ll spend a lot of time working with them, and the point is to learn that it’s a tool, like anything else. The people who are scared of them will learn not to be, and the people who are just a little too into them will settle down. They issue you your rifle—don’t call it a gun—pretty early, but you’ll have plenty of time to practice carrying it, cleaning it, and taking it apart before they even issue you any ammunition.”

“I forgot about how insane they are about not calling it a gun,” Angel said. “There’s all kind of terminology they want you to know. You have to know all the ranks, you have to know who gets called ‘sir’ and who doesn’t, and—all kinds of stuff.”

“Drill instructors aren’t called sir,” Jim added. “You learn that the first time somebody calls one ‘sir.’”

“That’s when the yelling starts,” Angel said. “About two minutes after you get there. And you have to pay attention to what other people get yelled at for. They get _really mad_ if you do something somebody else just got yelled at for.”

“Right, you’re expected to learn from other people’s mistakes, not just your own,” Kas agreed. “What else do they need to know, Jim?”

“You only get about six hours to sleep every night, less if you have the watch, so use it to sleep,” Jim said. “It takes less time than you think to get used to showering with a bunch of other guys. I don’t know—it’s two months out of your life. Get through it and move on. Oh, and using military lingo that you learned from the movies is a good way to make yourself look like an idiot. Chances are it’s either something nobody ever said, something they don’t say anymore, or something they say in another branch of the service.”

“Army people are insane about that,” Angel agreed. “They make up their own names for things, and you have to use the names they made up, and not the names some other service made up. The bathroom is a latrine, but not a head. That thing you sleep on is a bunk, not a rack or a cot or a bed. The place where they feed you is the—okay, I forgot that one. Is it us that calls it the mess?”

“No,” Kas said patiently. “That’s the Navy. We call it a chow hall.” 

“Mess would make more sense, considering what they feed you. Chow hall,” he muttered disgustedly. 

“I don’t know why you had so much trouble with that stuff,” Kas said. “You learned more complicated terminology in medical school, and a lot more of it.”

“That’s different. There’s a reason for it—when you learn medical terminology, you’re learning names for things that exist, but that most people never have to refer to with that kind of precision. And everybody speaks the same language, so that we know exactly what someone else is talking about. This military thing, it would be like if every specialty had its own language.”

“There’s a reason for the military stuff, too,” Blair pointed out. “There has to be. I bet it’s about in-group and out-group identification.” He was glad to have something to contribute. While the conversation was a reasonably good distraction from their own problems, he’d been feeling left out. “Learning new names for everyday things helps to enculturate you—as you learn the language, you become part of the group. And the different branches having slightly different names for things helps with identifying the boundaries of the tribe, who’s ‘us’ and who’s ‘them.’ The other branches aren’t quite as much ‘them’ as civilians are, but they still aren’t ‘us.’ Right?” he asked Jim.

“Yeah,” Jim agreed. “When you aren’t actually in combat, there’s a lot of rivalry between the services.”

“Right, so language would be one way of demonstrating that you’re on the home team. There are probably other things too—the uniforms are different, right?”

Kas nodded. “And the haircuts.”

“So there are visual markers. And probably more linguistic markers. Are there derogatory nicknames for the other services?”

“Yep,” Jim said. 

“And jokes, probably. Like how city people tell jokes about rural people having sex with their sisters, and rural people tell jokes about city people, I don’t know, trying to milk bulls and stuff.”

“There are definitely jokes,” Jim agreed. 

He and Kas exchanged several, which gave Blair an opportunity to categorize their implicit messages. Not surprisingly, the ones they knew revolved around establishing that the Army was the best branch, and that the others were inferior in specific ways—Marines were dumb and crazy, Air Force were effete, and the Navy were both effete and dumb. 

“But guys from different services all tell the same civilian jokes,” Jim added. “I guess that proves your point about the ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

“Right,” Blair said, nodding. “When I was living with a remote tribes in Palau, they told the same kinds of jokes about the neighboring tribe—the tribe to the west were lunatics who’d kill you as soon as look at you, the tribe to the east were inbred and have sex with livestock, the tribe to the north eat disgusting things because they insist on living where the perfectly normal things that the home tribe eats don’t grow. But when they meet to trade or negotiate, they all make fun of the townspeople and farmers to the south. Same thing.” He still had a lot of notes from that trip on his laptop. There might be a paper in it, if this experience gave him a chance to collect more data—a cross-cultural comparison of the role of jokes to establish group boundaries in closed societies. Putting Palauan tribesmen and US military personnel in the same paper was the kind of thing comparative anthropologists would eat up with a spoon.

“And enlisted and NCOs in all the services tell the same kinds of jokes about commissioned officers,” Kas added. “That can be awkward for Guides, because most of us are NCOs, but Sentinels are officers. They just made me a Lieutenant because all nurses are commissioned officers—anyway, you’re kind of neither fish nor fowl. You can’t bitch about your Sentinel the way everybody else can about their CO’s. Plus you can get swapped out to other services, and then you’re a cat in the doghouse.”

“The jokes thing might help with that,” Blair suggested. “If you go prepared with some of your own about how the Army sucks. Telling jokes about how dumb your own people are is a great way to fit in with another culture.”

“That could work,” Kas agreed. “A little bit, at least. But no one takes you seriously as a soldier—you’re just the guy who follows the Sentinel around. If he’s a decent, well-respected guy, his subordinates treat you like a mascot. That bugged the shit out of me, but it beats the alternative. If your Sentinel’s a real prick, they assume anything you see or hear will get back to him and treat you like a leper.” 

“Are all of the Army Sentinels men?” one of the boys asked. “You keep saying ‘he.’”

“No,” Angel said. “There are _more_ men, but there are women. Women have an easier time getting out to go to civilian jobs once their first hitch is up, so it’s maybe two-thirds men.”

“At first, when they’re rotating you around, they usually put male Guides with male Sentinels, and females with females,” Kas added. “The Army is kind of uncomfortable with un-Bonded opposite-sex pairs. And they don’t put a lot of females, Sentinels or Guides, in combat positions—it’s allowed, but it doesn’t happen that often. So don’t expect that your first assignment is going to be a hot lady Sentinel. Except for you,” he added to the girl. “I mean, maybe not the hot part, but you probably will get a female Sentinel for your first assignment.”

After the boys had digested this for a moment, the other one asked, “So do you think we’ll have to go to Iraq?”

“There’s no way to know,” Kas answered. “Most of your buddies from basic can expect that they’ll probably be going, especially if they’re going into infantry. For you it’s less likely—Sentinels in combat zones usually want a Guide with some experience. But the Army doesn’t always give you what you want—well, the Army frankly does not give a shit what you want, but they don’t always give Sentinels what they want, either.”

“Worry more about what your Sentinel is like than where they send you, anyway,” Blair added. “Trust me, they can make you fear for your life anywhere.”

Jim squeezed him. “We’re not all that bad.”

Blair made a face. “I’ve met five Sentinels, and the only two of them I could stand are in this truck. But my sample is probably a little skewed.”

“They do give you the worst ones if they think you’re a troublemaker,” Kas agreed. “But the thing about the bad ones is that nobody can stand them for long, so they go through a lot of Guides. That means everybody gets a turn putting up with them. I don’t want to scare you, but you’re better off knowing what to expect.”

“How bad is bad?” the girl asked.

“Bad,” said Angel. “Really, really bad.”

“I wasn’t kidding about fearing for your life,” Blair added. “And they are allowed to beat the shit out of you if they feel like it. I don’t really wanna talk about the details,” he added, when the girl opened her mouth.

She nodded. “Okay. I understand.”

“I can tell you some details, if you really want them,” Kas added. “Working at Walter Reed and then at a civilian hospital in DC, we saw a fair number of Guides come in with Sentinel-inflicted injuries. I don’t know if I could give you a percentage….”

“Probably about one a month,” Angel said. “Now, like Blair said, it’s a skewed sample. Working where we did, Sentinels and Guides were pretty thick on the ground. At Cascade General, we’ve seen two serious abuse cases in two years. And one of those was G-TAC, not a Sentinel.”

“There’s a lot they can do without putting you in the hospital, though,” Blair added grimly. None of his three had ever actually landed him in the hospital, although there had been a couple of times he probably _should_ have been. 

The kids were looking pretty shell-shocked now, and Kas said quickly, “But those are the extreme cases. What I said about probably getting at least one bad one, I was thinking of a step below what Blair’s talking about. Ones who will make your boot camp drill sergeant look like Santa Claus, but won’t actually do you any permanent harm. The thing to do when you get one of those is petition for reassignment every chance you get. You’re allowed to make a new petition every—I think it’s every two months, but I could be wrong. They usually turn down your first one. A lot of people think that once you’re turned down, you should just tough it out so they don’t think you’re a whiner, but it’s actually the opposite. If the Sentinel is hard to match up with a Guide, they turn down the first petition almost automatically, and if they don’t get another one they figure you weren’t serious. So if it’s bad, don’t wait until you can’t stand it anymore to petition.” 

“If you’re really in fear for your life, there are things you can do after your first petition gets turned down,” Angel added. “Don’t contact your G-TAC liaison again—that does make them think you’re a whiner. Go to somebody in your unit who either outranks your Sentinel or is off to one side of him—his commanding officer, your unit’s medical staff—especially if you have injuries they can document—or your unit’s chaplain. The CO can be hard to get access to, but you have a right to speak confidentially to medical personnel or the chaplain. If you can get one of them on your side, they can file an emergency petition—you can’t do that on your own.”

“Any other US military Sentinel can do an emergency petition for you, too,” Kas added, “if there is another one attached to the same unit, or the same base, anywhere in the area really. They can be from another service, too, if you’re on some kind of joint operation. Go to their Guide first and sound them out, though—pleading your case to another Sentinel _isn’t_ confidential—unless the Sentinel is a chaplain or medical personnel as well—so if they think you’re lying or you had it coming, they can go back to your own Sentinel and tell them what you said.”

“If you have a choice—and that would really only happen if you’re someplace like DC or Iraq, where there are Sentinels from all branches all over the place—and you don’t know where to start, try a Marine first,” Angel added. “Just playing the averages, Marines tend to be a lot gentler with Guides than the other services. I don’t know why—Air Force tend to be the worst. But there are tons of exceptions.”

“Probably has to do with anxious masculinity,” Blair suggested. “If the Air Force guys know that everyone else thinks they’re pussies, they have something to prove. Marines don’t.”

“I bet you’re right,” Kas said. “Just going on general observation, the big scary-looking guys like Jim are often more easygoing. He’s not a Marine, but he’s an Army Ranger—we eat Marines for breakfast. And women Sentinels in combat positions tend to be real iron-plated hell-bitches.” 

“And short guys,” Angel said. “But again, plenty of exceptions. Like me.” 

“That’s another thing,” Kas added. “Sometimes ones who have a reputation for being really difficult, or who your liaison officer warns you ahead of time might be difficult, turn out to just have a lot of quirks, which you might be able to cope with. When they sent me to Angel, my liaison officer told me he’d probably be a nightmare to work with, and that they picked me for it because they knew I was tough enough to handle it. But he’s a sweetheart. Just kind of weird.”

“So reserve judgment until you actually get there,” Angel continued. “But when you do meet your Sentinel, trust your gut—Guides are supposed to _like_ Sentinels. Neurologically, I mean, not culturally. If you meet him and he scares the crap out of you, there’s probably a reason.”

“Unfortunately,” Kas added, “you can’t try for an emergency petition based on your gut feeling. And don’t try for one if it’s anything less than an actual emergency—you really think your Sentinel is going to kill you, rape you, or permanently injure you,” Kas put in. “If you go over your Sentinel’s head for what the Army considers normal discipline, or if they investigate and decide you were exaggerating, that makes it harder for the next person who really is in trouble.”

“There’s a good chance you’ll never need to know about emergency petitions—for yourself, anyway,” Angel added. “But it’s good to know anyway, in case you meet someone who does. G-TAC and the Army don’t tell you that you have options beyond the regular petition for transfer.”

“There’s a lot they don’t tell you,” Kas said. “Other Guides—and decent Sentinels—are your best resource, so ask questions when you get a chance. Like you’re doing now. There are some things G-TAC doesn’t want you to know, and some things they just _don’t_ know—like in some places, there are chemicals or plants or other environmental hazards that can affect Sentinels really badly, and the only person who can warn you about that is a Guide who’s been there. Or a Guide who knows a Guide who’s been there. Or you might get tips about dealing with certain Sentinels, or certain problems—even if you don’t think it will affect you, try to remember it so you can pass it along to somebody else who does need to know.”

“Oh, wow,” Blair said. 

“What?” Jim said.

“Oral transmission of Guide lore in a modern context? This is incredible. I need to be writing this down.” As far as his primary research interest was concerned, that was the fucking Holy Grail, and he hadn’t even realized he was _watching it happen_. Holy shit. The Guide kids were looking at him in confusion, and he explained quickly, “I’m an anthropologist; I study Sentinels and Guides, mostly in non-industrialized societies.”

The girl Guide glanced around. “I thought you _were_ a Guide.”

“That, too,” he said impatiently. “In traditional cultures, Guides are taught by other Guides—sort of an apprenticeship system. Oh, man, you have no idea how cool this is.”

“This doesn’t sound much like the Guide lore you were telling me about before,” Jim pointed out. “With the visions and the magical powers and everything.”

“It’s different lore, but it’s still lore,” Blair said impatiently. The content was disturbing, but perhaps the most important thing about it was that it meant that modern Guide culture had a mechanism for the transmission of lore. If there were secrets—possibly even powers that Guides didn’t know they had, or didn’t know _were_ powers, there was a way for new Guides to learn them. He struggled to formulate a question that wouldn’t lead Kas to the answer he was hoping for. Finally he settled on, “I bet Angel had a lot of sensory spikes in boot camp.”

“He did,” Kas said slowly. “Why?”

“He’s doing his anthropologist thing,” Jim explained. “Just play along. It’s usually interesting.”

“What did you do about them?”

“Oh,” Kas said. “Yeah, that’s a good thing for them to know, for later. There are a lot of different tricks—you have to experiment and see what works. What G-TAC tells you to do is get your Sentinel away from whatever stimuli is causing the spike, right?” 

The kids nodded.

“And that is a good idea, but it’s not always possible. If your Sentinel is spiking on, say, enemy fire, you can’t ask the enemy to stop shooting at you for a minute. Hell, even if he’s spiking on friendly fire, you can’t ask the rest of the squad to stop shooting. You have to distract him from whatever stimuli he’s spiking on. Some people recite something—the Army motto, the Gettysburg Address, the Lord’s Prayer, whatever. With some Sentinels, if you do the same thing every time, it acts like a conditioned response. Or you can use scent—if your Sentinel likes you, you can ask him to just focus on your scent; that’s the easiest. I—this is gross, but I used to keep a handkerchief inside my shirt, and then give it to him to smell if he was spiking really badly. Or if I had to be apart from him for a little while and he was freaking out about it. 

“What else…if the Sentinel doesn’t like your scent, you can use something else that he does like. It usually has to be natural, not an artificial chemical. You can get essential oils at a health-food store, and put some on a handkerchief or a cotton ball, and seal it in something airtight—a ziplock or something. It takes some experimenting to find out what scent to use. 

“Or ask them to do something moderately mentally challenging—ask _them_ to recite, or do the times table, or count backward by twos, or whatever. With Angel, I would do anatomy—ask him to tell me all the bones in the hand, or all the facial muscles, something like that. It has to be something the Sentinel knows, obviously, and it has to be challenging enough that they have to really concentrate on it—so not the ABCs, unless your Sentinel is really slow. But it can’t be too hard, either. So you have to experiment. All of this is much, much easier if your Sentinel will cooperate with you, of course—some of them just expect you to fix it, and they don’t get why they have to help you figure out how. That’s why, if you get a chance to talk to the Sentinel’s previous Guide, do it, and ask what they did, what worked and what didn’t. Some people write up notes for the next Guide, which is really helpful—if you get a chance, ask the last guy to do that, and do it for the one after you. But you have to be careful about it. Some Sentinels are fine with their Guides leaving notes for the next person, but some of them really hate the idea of Guides talking about them amongst themselves, so that’s a problem.”

So there was a _second_ method for the transmission of lore. This was getting better and better.

“I always kept my Guides’ notes, when I was in the Army,” Jim said. “Then I could give the new guy the whole file.”

“Do you still have them?” Blair asked eagerly. _Primary sources!_

“I don’t think so,” Jim said. “I could check my footlocker when we get home—if we get home. Why? I hardly ever spike or zone.”

“Uh, for the research,” Blair admitted. He hadn’t even thought of using the notes for his other job. “But you should tell me what your tricks are, sometime, if you remember. Just in case.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “Just in case.”

“Anyway,” Blair said, returning to his research interview, “did G-TAC teach you those techniques?”

“No,” Kas said. “G-TAC just teaches you protocol. You know that. The only useful thing they even mention is the working link.”

“Right, that was more of a Socratic question. How did you learn the useful stuff?”

“From other Guides. When you’re new,” he added to the kids, “older Guides will pretty much start giving you advice before you even have to ask. That’s something to remember about when you’re older, too—help other people, like you were helped, or would want to have been helped, when you were new.”

_Meta-lore_ , Blair thought. It sucked beyond the telling of it that he couldn’t record this, or take notes on it, but that was one of the key points to remember. The lore included lore about lore. Traditional lore often didn’t—the rules about who lore should be passed to were usually unspoken and considered obvious: there were some things you told everybody you could, some things you only told members of your tribe, and some that you only told carefully-selected apprentices, and the content and circumstances of transmission told you which were which. “Where and when do Guides meet up to talk about this kind of stuff?”

“It’s always by chance,” Kas said. “We don’t have meetings. But there are plenty of opportunities. There’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in the Army. A bunch of people from different units will end up in the same spot waiting to be deployed, or you’ll be on a transport—like this—or your Sentinel meets up with another Sentinel, and the Guides get sent into the kitchen to have a gossip. Or you’re assigned to a big base and there are other Guides assigned there, and you just kind of gravitate. You end up at the gym at the same time, or the chow hall, or you run errands together. Anything like that. When you’re new, you don’t have to worry about finding other Guides; they’ll find you. It’s just what we do.”

_It’s just what we do_ could be the epigraph for the paper on Guide culture in the US military. Or possibly the dissertation. There would be a lot of resistance to the idea that there was such a thing as Guide culture in an industrialized society—but that little phrase was the perfect refutation. That’s what culture was, things that a certain group “just did.” 

Kas told them about zones next, and then the girl—Becky; they had introduced themselves by this time—asked how you actually _did_ make a working link. “They explained it, but I don’t really get it.”

“They still don’t have you actually practice the working link at G-TAC?” Kas asked.

“No,” said one of the boys, Scott. “They just talk about it.”

“That’s stupid. I was hoping they’d changed it.”

“They do have you practice it at Sentinel School,” Angel said. 

“That makes perfect sense,” Blair said. “I mean, not in terms of what actually works, but in terms of our culture’s insistence on pretending that being a Guide doesn’t involve skills of any kind.”

“It doesn’t,” said the other boy, Jason.

“What do you think he’s been telling us about for the last hour?” Becky asked him. “Idiot.”

“I wish we could let you try the working link,” Kas said, “but we can’t, since Jim and Angel are both Bonded. It’s hard to explain—you just have to do it, and then you know how.”

“Hm,” Blair said, not quite disagreeing, but almost. “You have to touch them—G-TAC tells you that—and then they tell you, ‘reach out with your mind.’ But if that metaphor doesn’t work for you, think of a different one—a bridge, or a fiber-optic cable, or a pipe. If you think of it as a pipe, you can control it the flow as a knob instead of a toggle. That way you instead of having it be either closed or wide open, you can have it be just open enough to do what you need to do—a trickle, or a steady stream, or a torrent. If you have a bad Sentinel, you can do the minimum.” 

“I’ve never heard of that,” Kas said. “Let me try it. Ang?”

Angel bent his head obligingly. “That’s…different. Might be good for surgery—it’s not as intense as a normal link.”

“Cool,” Kas said, breaking the contact. “You should try it,” he told the kids. “But don’t do what I just did—most Sentinels don’t really appreciate it if you say you want to try out this cool thing your buddy just told you about. When you try something new, pretend you’ve done it before.”

Next, Jason asked about Bonding. Blair wasn’t surprised to learn that Kas and Angel didn’t know of any other ways to do it than the usual method of leaving the working link open for an extended period. That was how they had done theirs, and how everyone they knew had done it. Blair decided not to mention that they had formed theirs differently, and that he didn’t know how they had done it.

“So is it better to be Bonded?” Becky asked.

“That’s…a tough one,” Kas said. “If you have a Sentinel you get along really well with, and you know you don’t want to be separated from, then it’s definitely better. A lot of people don’t have that, though. They Bond with somebody who’s just sort of okay, because they want the stability, or they’re afraid of being assigned to someone worse. Being moved around is hard—once you’re Bonded, your Sentinel gets comfortable with you, and you learn all his quirks and how to manage them, so that’s easier. Most Sentinels, when they get a new Guide they like to watch you every minute, and they really jump on every mistake you make. So you have more freedom once you’ve been with the same one for a while. Bonding is the only way you can make sure you don’t get shifted somewhere else. So yeah, most people think it’s better.”

“One of the Guides at the police department is un-Bonded, and he says he likes it,” Blair said, referring to Sam, the department Guide who thought Jim was “a dreamboat.” “He has to put up with a lot of shit, but he likes the independence. He has his own apartment.”

“They let Guides do that?” Scott asked.

“Not real often,” Blair said. “He had to live in the dorms at G-TAC for a long time before they let him move out.” 

“What you don’t want to do,” Kas said, “is Bond with somebody just to do it. You’re going to be with them for life, so you have to be really sure you like them.”

“And don’t Bond with a psychopath because you think it’ll fix him,” Angel added. 

“People really do that?” Blair asked. He couldn’t imagine.

Angel nodded grimly. “They sure do. For the same reasons women marry abusive boyfriends, I guess. Sometimes he has some charming qualities when he isn’t flipping the fuck out, sometimes he just seems to really need a Guide. A lot of really volatile Sentinels have very poor control over their senses, and being Bonded does help with that, so it kind of makes sense to think that once he’d Bonded and his senses aren’t bothering him as much, he’ll settle down. But a lot of times, it doesn’t work that way.”

“A lot of them, I think, resent needing the Guide so much, and Bonding _definitely_ doesn’t help with that,” Kas said. “Or sometimes you Bond and then find out they were actually showing some restraint so you would stick around. The only thing you can do about psycho Sentinels is get away from them, and if you’re Bonded, you’re stuck. And nobody can _make_ you Bond—G-TAC or your Sentinel can pressure you to do it, but they can’t force you, because all you have to do is shut down the link. If necessary, you can pretend it just didn’t work, and you have no idea why.”

Angel nodded. “How Bonding works isn’t particularly well understood, so they won’t be able to blame you.”

“They can blame you,” Kas corrected, “but the same way some Sentinels blame their Guides for everything that goes wrong. But they can’t tell if you actually did it on purpose.” 

Jim said very quietly, “Unless the G-TAC liaison who’s sitting right over there tells them you just said that.” 

Blair didn’t think that Kas had heard him, but Angel, obviously, did. He said quickly, “Of course, sometimes Bonding does just fail for no reason.” 

“What do you do if that happens, and you _want_ to be Bonded?” Becky asked.

“Keep trying,” Angel said. “If you’re sure. One of the theories is that Bonding depends on intention—if you really don’t want to, or the Sentinel doesn’t want to, even subconsciously, it won’t work. You might try waiting a couple of months before trying again, to make sure.” 

Blair had no idea if that was a lie or not, but it seemed like decent advice either way. 

After a few more minutes, Becky said, “Um, do you know if we’re going to stop to, um, use the bathroom?” 

Jim glanced over at the soldiers. “Are we?” he asked, when neither of them said anything.

“We usually make a lunch stop, sir,” he said stiffly. “Let me check.” He spoke into his radio. “Walters, are we stopping at the Flying J on this run?” Blair couldn’t make out the reply, but the soldier confirmed, “We’re about twenty miles out.”

“Can you make it that long?” Jim asked Becky. 

She nodded, blushing furiously. 

#

When they climbed out of the transport at the truck stop, Jim saw an officer’s staff car parked next to them. The G-TAC and SRB liaisons got out. Their driver, a female soldier, escorted Becky inside the building. Leaving the Private to watch them, the PFC went over to speak to the officers.

“Any problems?” the SRB liaison officer asked him.

“No problems, sir. They kept talking to the trainees,” he said doubtfully. 

The G-TAC liaison officer asked sharply, “Talking about what?”

“Just Guide chatter, sir. The trainees wanted to know what boot camp is like.”

_Guide chatter_. He’d have to remember to repeat that to Blair. His reaction would be funny. 

The liaison officer chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. You know what Guides are like. Anything from the Sentinels?”

“Nothing much, sir. They talked a little bit, but it was mostly the big Guide.”

The liaison officer’s eyes flicked over to Kas. “He’s not a problem,” he said dismissively. “Go ahead and take them all in.”

“We’ll be right behind you to keep an eye on the Sentinels,” the SRB liaison added. 

They all went inside. The two enlisted men took turns guarding the door while they hit the restrooms. On his way in, Jim made sure to give them a look indicated that if he didn’t try to get past them, it was because he chose not to, not because they had any chance in hell of stopping him.

Once they had all finished, they met up with Becky and the female enlisted man to order from the truck stop’s fast-food restaurant. Angel, predictably, whined to Kas that he wasn’t hungry. Kas ordered him a chicken sandwich and fries anyway. 

Angel was going to get really annoying, really fast, if he didn’t knock it off. Better Kas than him. 

The enlisted men and the liaison officers took seats at separate tables, the trainee Guides sitting with the enlisted. Jim hesitated for a moment. He was an officer, and outside of field conditions, officers didn’t eat with enlisted. 

In light of Sandburg’s latest anthropology lesson, though, he thought of the reason behind that custom. _Us and them._

G-TAC was definitely _them_. He sat at the Guides’ table. Kas and Angel—and of course Blair—followed suit. 

Thinking that Kas, Angel, and Blair probably wouldn’t be smart enough to just keep quiet while the liaison officers were in earshot, and that they might not think to be circumspect about what they talked about, either, Jim asked the trainees, “Do you guys have any more questions about boot camp?” as he started unwrapping his sandwich.

“Actually,” Becky said, looking at the female enlisted, “I was wondering what happens when you, you know. Get your….”

The female enlisted—Widener, from the name stenciled on her uniform--stared at her as if she couldn’t quite believe that Becky was talking to her. “Your what?” she asked scathingly.

“Uh, you know. Your period,” she whispered.

“You don’t know what to do when you get your period? What are you, twelve?”

“Private,” Jim snapped. “She asked you a perfectly civil question. Do you have a problem with that?”

She stared at him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve met. My name is Major Ellison. You can call me Major Ellison. Now, do you have a problem?” Blair, next to him, seemed to be trying hard not to laugh. Good—Jim had figured he’d get a charge out of Jim putting the G-TAC liaisons in their place.

“No, sir!”

“I didn’t think so.” 

Glancing sheepishly at Becky, Widener said, “You’ll be able to buy what you need at the BX. They’ll take you there right after you get your uniform issue.”

After taking a quick glance at Jim, Becky looked back at Widener and said, “Thank you.”

“Boot lasts two months,” Angel told her, “so it’ll happen to all the women, unless you drop so much weight it doesn’t…anyway, it’s not like it’s some surprise no one will be ready for. You just deal with it like normal.” Glancing over at Widener, he added, “My friends call me Angel. You can call me Captain Temas.”

“By the way,” Kas said, “the drill sergeants are allowed to give you attitude when you ask perfectly reasonable questions. I’m pretty sure they’re encouraged to, actually. But unless they’ve changed the uniform drastically in the last few years, no one at this table is a drill sergeant.”

“These people are civilians for the next couple of hours anyway,” Jim said. “Have they changed the regulations to say that it’s acceptable for soldiers wearing the uniform of the United States Army to mouth off to civilians?”

PFC Thompson hadn’t gotten to be a PFC by being stupid; he sounded off, “No, sir,” right away. 

“I didn’t think so,” Jim said. “So let’s act like human beings, just for a change.”

Private Davies proved he wasn’t stupid either, by saying, “If you don’t mind, sir, we could tell them how basic has changed since your day. Sir.”

Jim nodded. “That sounds like a very good idea.”

Davies seemed uncertain about how to follow up on his good idea, but eventually said, “The Drill Sergeants aren’t allowed to use profanity anymore.”

“Really?” said Angel. “That’s like half their vocabulary.” 

“They’ve learned to get around it. Sir,” said Thompson. 

“They aren’t supposed to make you eat everything on your tray at chow anymore, either,” said Widener. Probably trying to make up for her earlier screw-up. Good man.

Angel groaned, pushing away the fries he had been playing with. “I had repressed that part. Thanks.”

“You forgot that part because it was one of the first things they stopped making you do,” Kas corrected him, pushing the fries back at him. “Eat. It’s going to be--”

“—a long day,” Angel sighed. “It’s all coming back to me now.”

Jim glanced over at Blair. He seemed okay, and was working on his lunch. Thank God he wasn’t as delicate as Angel.

Or delicate at all, really. His Guide was tough; he’d known that from the beginning. 

When they hit the road again, this time Privates Widener and Braswell—who had been driving them before, apparently—replaced Davies and PFC Thompson in the back of the truck with them. Jim wondered for a while about the reasons for that, before deciding it was probably just a matter of sharing the driving chores. 

The trainees were nervous about it, though. They kept taking anxious glances at the new guards, until Kas managed to get them settled down by talking about Sentinels some more. 

When Kas had finished talked about how most Sentinels had a few little things they were insanely particular about—did he have any of those?—Jim said, “You make it sound like you don’t even like Sentinels.”

Kas glanced at him, startled, and gave Angel a squeeze. “Of course I like Sentinels. They’re just…not always the easiest people to work with. And the Army pretty much gives them permission to be assholes to Guides—you’ve been to Sentinel School.”

He had, but he didn’t remember that much about it. There had been a lot of stuff about disciplining Guides; he’d tried to forget it—oh. Right, that would be what Kas was talking about.

“Since I was already Bonded to Angel by then, I went to Sentinel School with him,” Kas explained. “I think I’m the only Guide who’s been—almost nobody is Bonded by then, unless it’s a sibling Bond, and usually they have rock-solid control, and can be separated during the training day.”

“Sentinel School wasn’t so bad,” Angel said. “Except for the parts with tear gas. I didn’t like that.”

“You’re not supposed to like that,” Kas sighed. “Anyway,” he told the trainees, “knowing what they tell them at Sentinel School helps you understand some of what they do. And one thing they learn is that it’s the Guide’s job to keep them comfortable and keep their senses under control. So the new Sentinels sometimes get the idea that if they’re anything less than one hundred percent happy, it must be your fault. Most of them get over that eventually. They also tell them that their assigned Guide’s conduct reflects on them, so a lot of them feel like they have to be a hardass with you or they’ll get in trouble. And then G-TAC comes in and tells them that maintaining tight discipline is the key to establishing a good Sentinel-Guide relationship, especially with their first Guide, and when a new Guide is assigned to them. So if they do that any everything turns out OK, they think it worked. If it doesn’t work that well, and they ask their liaison what went wrong, they usually hear that they weren’t strict enough. So most of the time, I would say, they want to be nice to you, but they’ve been taught that they aren’t supposed to. And they don’t get together and compare notes the way we do, so it takes a while for them to figure out they’ve been taught wrong.”

“Or they never do,” Angel added, “but usually they eventually decide their Guide must be the exception, the only Guide on Earth that won’t end up being spoiled if they’re treated well.”

“Or they keep a tight ship, and the Guide just gets used to it,” Kas said. “But that’s the kind of thing you can reasonably expect to run into—Sentinels that basically mean well, and want to have a good partnership, but their ideas about how to make that happen are kind of screwed up. They eventually learn better, but you’re likely to spend your first few years providing Sentinels with important learning experiences. Usually after you’ve worked with a couple of experienced Sentinels, you get the fun job of being somebody’s first-ever Guide. That’s almost always monumentally shitty, because remember, they’ve had it pounded into them that maintaining discipline is one of the most important things they can do. And where were they right before Sentinel School?”

The trainees looked confused for a moment, but eventually Scott said, “Basic training?”

“Right. So they usually try to act like their drill sergeants—but the thing about drill sergeants is that they’ve had extensive education about how to scare the hell out of recruits without actually hurting them. Sentinels don’t get that, and unlike drill sergeants, they are allowed to touch you, so there’s that, too. And most people get at least one older one who’s just insanely pissy and cranky, and he’s had years to perfect his drill sergeant act. I had one of each, before Angel—personally I found the newbie scarier, because the old guy at least knew where the line was—Angel, stop whimpering.” 

“No wonder Dave—he was my first assigned Guide—was so twitchy,” Jim said. Dave had been a recipient of G-TAC’s “special treatment,” too, but maybe that hadn’t been the whole story. He’d known right away where to stuff all the things he’d learned about Guides in Sentinel School, and he’d half-assumed that most other Sentinels did, too.

“Yeah, I bet all your Guides loved you,” Kas agreed. “You’ll have some that are perfectly nice, but it’s a nice surprise when you do. As long as you aren’t really, really unlucky, and you don’t do anything stupid like Bond to a psychopath, you can plan on having a decent life, with a few rough spots.”

Throughout the rest of the drive, Kas kept coming up with more things to tell the trainees about. They circled back around to talking about Basic again, and Widener—who really was proving capable of learning from a mistake—volunteered the information that Basic was co-ed now, so the three Guides might end up training together. 

“You mean we have to shower with boys?” Becky asked, sounding horrified.

“No—the female barracks is separate, and you always shower and change in there. But you’re with the males for PT, and drill, and chow—pretty much everything outside the barracks or the latrines. But get used to the males calling you ‘Hey you, female,’ if they don’t know your name.”

By the time they finally got to Fort Lewis, Jim had gotten to like the kids—even Private Widener, who he decided must have literally never heard of the radical idea of being nice to Guides. Watching two of the enlisted march the trainees off to Reception, Jim hoped they would all be okay, and that maybe the lesson Widener had learned would stick with her. 

They were escorted by the liaison officers and the other two enlisted to another conference room. When they got there, the liaison officers gave back their wallets and watches, but not their cell phone, Jim’s badge and gun, or the gun he had lent Kas for their mission. They had just gotten everything stowed away and sat down when a Colonel came in, and they all had to stand up again—Kas pulling Angel to his feet by his collar. Blair stayed sitting, but that was okay—he was a civilian. 

The Colonel wasted no time in giving them their orders. “Gentlemen, you are confined to quarters, unless escorted elsewhere under my instructions, pending further orders. Dismissed.”

Well, that was quick. 

“What does that mean?” Blair asked when they had left the conference room. 

“It means they’re sending us to our room until they figure out what to do with us,” Jim explained.

“That doesn’t sound too bad.”

Jim nodded. Probably not. They had picked up a new escort, a corporal and a sergeant. The two NCOs loaded them into a jeep—a little bit of a chore with Blair’s crutches—and drove them across the base to a barracks building. 

From the uniforms of the people they passed on the way in, Jim could tell it was senior enlisted housing. Well, that made sense—officers’ housing on base was usually townhouses or single-family homes, with back doors, patios, balconies, and windows that opened. Hard to secure. He would be a little offended that the Army didn’t trust him to stay put when he was ordered confined to quarters, except that he _had_ just been caught breaking into a government building. He could kind of see their point. 

He wasn’t sure whether to hope that they’d be split up or kept together, but decided on balance that he was relieved when they were shown into a two-bedroom apartment. Blair would worry if they were separated from the others.

Before they did anything else, he and Kas walked through, checking for bugs. Angel wandered around some too, but Jim had honestly no idea what he was doing. The apartment was clean, both of electronic surveillance devices and of actual dirt, but Jim could detect traces of recent occupancy—traces of several different fruity and floral shampoos in the bathroom, a lingering hint of microwave popcorn in the kitchenette. He came to the conclusion that as recently as this morning, the apartment had been occupied by three women—there were four bunks now, but one smelled like it had just come out of storage. The enlisted women had probably been kicked out and sent to some less-desirable housing to make room for them here. 

Unfortunately, he couldn’t put the evidence together in any way that gave him a hint of what the Army might be planning for them. They weren’t in the stockade—that was good. But they were clearly still prisoners in all but name—not so good. They had been placed in enlisted housing, which since three of them were officers, was hard not to read as an insult. But they’d been placed in the best, newest enlisted housing on the base—probably the most comfortable quarters that would meet the security needs of their not-quite-prisoner status.

He returned to the small living room and found Blair trying to sit down on the wooden-framed couch. Jim helped him down, and propped his crutches up where he could reach them. “Are you holding up okay?” he asked, sitting down next to Blair.

Blair nodded. “This doesn’t look too bad,” he said, looking around at the room. “Kind of like an upperclassman dorm—the ones they put in all the brochures, but you have to win the housing lottery to get in.” 

“That’s pretty much what it is,” Jim agreed. “Single senior enlisted housing. They probably do put it in the recruiting brochures.” 

“Did they give us toothbrushes?”

“No toothbrushes,” Jim said. They had just about everything else—furniture, linens and towels, a few dishes, a saucepan, and skillet in the kitchenette. 

“Damn. It really bugs me when my teeth get all fuzzy.”

If that was the biggest complaint he had, Blair really must be doing all right. Just to be sure, Jim checked him over with his senses—Blair’s heart rate was just the tiniest bit elevated, and he was producing a small, steady stream of stress pheromones. 

Okay, then. All things considered, he had to count the rescue mission a qualified success. They hadn’t managed to escape the country, but he had gotten Blair out before he suffered any really serious physical or psychological harm, and they were together and safe. That could change, but Jim was confident enough that as long as he and Blair were together, he could protect his Guide. 

Echoing his thoughts, Blair said, “It’s not home, but it’s a lot nicer than where we were this morning. Or where I was last night. We’re definitely trending upward.”

“Yeah.” Putting his arm around Blair, Jim pulled him in close. 

In one of the bedrooms, Kas was trying to get Angel to lie down and rest. Angel had gotten as far as taking off his shoes and lying down, but was complaining about how the mattress was too hard, the pillow was too thin, the blanket was too scratchy, the sunlight was too bright, the Earth was rotating too rapidly—okay, maybe not that last one, but he was bitching about everything else. 

Eventually, though, he settled down, and not long after, Kas came out of the bedroom, looking frazzled. “I think he’s asleep,” he said, dropping into the armchair that sat near the sofa. 

“I guess he’s pretty upset,” Blair said. 

Kas nodded. “He really hated being in the Army the first time, and he doesn’t do so well with anticipation—he builds things up in his head, worries about what might be coming next. I hope they give us some work to do soon; that’ll take his mind off it.” 

“You think they will?” Blair asked. “I was thinking maybe they’d just keep us locked up here indefinitely.”

Jim and Kas exchanged a look. “That could happen,” Kas said. “But chances are even if that’s what G-TAC wants, the commander of this base won’t much like having his base used as a _de facto_ prison. They’ll probably give us duties of some kind eventually. Unless they court martial us.”

“If they’re playing by their own rules,” Jim said, “and so far they seem to be, they can’t court martial us for something we did as civilians. So behave,” he added, tapping Blair on the back of the head. 

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Kas said, “and my guess is that G-TAC didn’t press criminal charges because it would be messy and public, and they want this to go away as soon as possible. Courts martial happen behind closed doors, so they could press charges that way, but I think Jim’s right, that they aren’t going to do that unless we give them an excuse.” 

“So we toe the line,” Blair said. 

“Yeah,” Jim said. “Think you can handle that?”

“Oh, sure.”

Before much longer, Angel came out of the bedroom and sat on the floor with his head in Kas’s lap. “I couldn’t sleep.” 

“Yeah, I didn’t really think that was going to work,” Kas said. 

#

“I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with…B,” Kas said. 

“Blair,” Angel said. 

“What?” Blair asked.

“No, that was my guess.”

“Oh. Wrong,” Kas said. 

“Berber carpet,” Jim guessed.

“No.”

“Bathroom door,” Blair suggested.

“Boredom,” was Angel’s next guess.

“Damn, I wish that was it,” Kas said. “No.” 

Not long after settling into their new quarters, Blair and the others had discovered that there was _absolutely nothing to do_. There was no TV, no books, not even a newspaper. Blair had seriously considered making his anthropological notes on toilet paper, but there was nothing to write his notes with, except possibly his own blood, which he had a feeling Jim would object to. 

Pretty soon they were going to have named everything in sight, and then I Spy would be out, too. 

“Bulb-comma-light,” Jim said, for his next guess.

“Nope.” 

Jim nudged Blair, who by this point was lying sprawled across the carpet, with his foot. “Your guess.”

He looked around the room. “Barstools,” he finally said. He was pretty sure they had already done that. 

“We have a winner,” Kas said. 

Great. Now he had to think of something. “I spy, blah-blah-blah, c.”

“Ceiling,” everyone else said. 

“Maybe we should switch to charades,” Angel suggested. 

“I’m not acting anything out,” Jim said. 

They eventually settled on Twenty Questions. 

Another interminable hour later, they were trying to guess what Angel might be thinking of that was mineral, smaller than a breadbox, and could kill you, but was not a gun or anything sharp, when someone knocked at the door.

They all looked at each other for a few moments. “It’s probably nothing,” Kas said. “Food or something—it’s about four.”

“That’s pretty early for dinner,” Angel said, worried.

“Not if they’re bringing us a case of MREs,” Jim pointed out. 

“Well, somebody answer it,” Blair said, sitting up and facing the door so that he could see what was coming. “If they’re hauling us off to the torture chamber, they’re not going to just go away.”

Kas got up and answered it. There were several men in army uniforms there, some of them holding luggage. Blair hoped they weren’t getting more roommates. “Permission to enter, sir,” the one in front said.

“Granted,” Jim called. 

It turned out that the soldiers were bringing them presents. They each got a duffle bag and a garment bag, which Jim and Angel had to sign for and agree to have paid for out of their first paychecks. Angel looked ready to just sign, but Jim separated out some of the forms and said, “We’ll return these once we’ve checked that everything is present and correct.”

Eventually the leader said, “Yes, sir,” and they left.

The clothing delivery gave them something to do for the next couple of hours. First they had to take their new stuff into the bedrooms and lay everything out on the beds, checking it off against the lists Jim had taken from the delivery boys. They both got a bunch of t-shirts, underwear, and socks, plus some sweats, shorts, and boots. Jim also had a couple of sets of fatigues and a dress uniform, in the garment bag. Blair had extra sweats and a G-TAC uniform. They also each got a box labeled “comfort pack,” which proved to have an assortment of travel-sized toiletries. Blair was especially glad to see a toothbrush and some Army stationery and pens.

“Dibs on the first shower,” Angel called from the other room. 

“Okay, if I can brush my teeth first,” Blair called back.

Jim had, along with his uniforms, a variety of patches and pins that took him a long time to attach just so to his different uniforms. Blair got a pin with the G-TAC insignia on it, and a name plate that said, “Guide Ellison.” 

While Kas and Angel had the bathroom, they put all of their things away, Jim explaining that the anal-retentive way he arranged everything in his closet and drawers at home was, in fact, the Army Way, and suggested that Blair try to maintain his own side of the closet the same way. “We really shouldn’t have to put up with barracks inspections, since we’re officers, but it’s just as easy to do it the right way, once you get used to it.”

Blair sincerely doubted that, but decided to humor him. 

When it was his turn in the shower, he learned that showering with a bad knee was tricky, although not nearly on the same level as showering with both hands in casts, much less both hands in casts and both feet unable to bear weight. Now he had one good leg, and there was a railing he could hold on to for balance. The only other problem was shampoo—the tiny bottles were probably meant to last a long while for someone with a military haircut, but would only be good for about two washings for him. 

Well, cross that bridge when he came to it. Jim and Kas would still have lots left by the time he ran out. 

Freshly washed, shaved, and dressed, they all re-gathered in the living room. Blair wasn’t too surprised to see that Angel, like him, had opted for the sweats, while Kas and Jim wore fatigues. 

Jim collected everybody’s forms, asking, “Anything missing?”

Kas and Angel exchanged a look. “Sort of,” Kas said. “It wasn’t on my list, though.” He turned his left shoulder toward Jim and pointed at it. “Did they give you yours?”

Jim nodded. “The one for the Class A’s, too.”

“Angel thought maybe they just didn’t have any, but clearly they do.”

“Bastards,” Jim said. “Make a note about it on your form—I’ll say something, too.”

“What didn’t they give you?” Blair asked. Jim and Kas both seemed pretty pissed off about it, whatever it was.

“My Ranger tabs,” Kas said. 

“This,” Jim explained, pointing out a badge on his shoulder that said, “RANGER.” 

“Oh,” Blair said.

“It’s very important,” Angel said. “To, you know, them. I guess I’d better complain about it too, huh?”

Once everyone except Blair had added a note about Kas’s Ranger tabs to the forms—Blair offered to put in his two cents too, but the others agreed it wouldn’t help—Jim returned them to the guard outside the door. 

While Jim and Kas occupied themselves by polishing their new boots—their own and Blair and Angel’s—Blair collected the paper from everyone’s comfort packs and started making notes on his observations from that day, in the smallest handwriting he could manage. Angel, taking back one of his sheets of paper, started writing a letter to his mother. It was keeping him happy and quiet, so no one commented on the likelihood—or lack thereof—that he would be allowed to send it. 

The atmosphere was a bit more relaxed now that everyone had something to do, but Blair had to admit that with Jim and Kas dressed up like soldiers, the place didn’t look so much like a college dorm anymore.

 

#

Blair had thought that, “Unless escorted elsewhere on my orders,” or whatever the guy had said, meant something like, “Unless hell freezes over,” but it turned out that they were escorted elsewhere on quite a variety of errands. On the first day, they were taken to get physicals and shots in the morning, and then in the afternoon they went to whatever the Army called the HR office, for Jim and Angel to fill out tax forms and direct deposit paperwork. He and Kas weren’t given forms of their own, but Blair was just as glad to be unnecessarily dragged along, since things were boring in the apartment. Later days were enlivened by more paperwork, dress uniform alterations, and similarly exciting events. 

Apart from the errands, meals were the only breaks in the tedium. The guys who were guarding the door brought them food regularly. There was plenty of it, and it wasn’t half bad—not gourmet cuisine, but it stacked up pretty well against any dorm food Blair had eaten. The portions were huge, and since they had the refrigerator and microwave, it was easy to save something for between-meals snacks. 

On the third day, the guards told him and Jim to come with them, and Angel and Kas to stay behind. It was with some alarm that Blair followed Jim out of the apartment. 

“Care to give us a hint where you’re taking us, Corporal?” Jim asked the leader of their guards while they were in the elevator. 

“To the BX, sir. I’m to inform you that you are to treat your presence on this base and the reasons thereof as classified. Therefore while in the BX you will not attempt to speak or to pass any object or item to anyone not myself or your Guide. You will use the credit chit provided, and the items you select will be deducted from your first paycheck,” the man recited. 

“Okay,” Jim said, nodding.

“What’s the BX?” Blair asked.

“Base Exchange,” Jim answered. He must have still looked confused, because Jim said, “Shopping; we’re going shopping.”

Oh. That was good. The toiletries from their comfort packs were starting to run out, and they hadn’t been brought any replacements. 

Blair wasn’t sure what he expected from the BX—maybe something like an old-timey general store, where everything was stored behind the counter and you asked a soldier with a hook for a hand and scars all over his face to get down what you needed. That, or else something like a convenience store where everything was packaged in khaki or olive drab.

“It would help to know if we’re staying here,” Jim told the corporal as they rode to the BX, which was apparently on the other side of the base, “or if not, where we’re going.”

“I haven’t been given that information, sir,” said the corporal.

When they got there, it turned out that the BX was actually like a big K-Mart, with maybe a Sears attached. There were a lot of people walking around in uniforms, but quite a few in regular clothes, and even mothers wrangling packs of kids, like you saw at normal stores. 

When they stepped inside, Blair felt the same rush of confusion that he felt when returning from a remote field expedition—everything was so colorful, and there was so _much_ of it. He recognized that there were slightly fewer choices for each product than at his usual stores—maybe ten kinds of toothpaste, instead of twenty—but after a few days away from the “real world,” even that amount of choices was dizzying.

“If we get shipped out, we’ll only be able to take a couple of bags,” Jim warned, “so let’s just get the essentials.” 

No problem—Blair had been on field expeditions before. He knew how to pack light. 

They hit the toiletries aisle first, followed by the pantry section for a few easy-to-pack snacks, like dried fruit, nuts, and jerky. There was a small selection of books and magazines—heavy on Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy, and Oprah’s Book Club selections. Blair grabbed everything that looked remotely readable, plus a couple of books of word puzzles. None of them were the kinds of things he’d want to read again and again—he could leave them behind as he finished reading them. He also got some decent pens and blank notebooks—he was all out of Comfort Pack paper, too. 

In the clothing section, Blair picked out a couple of shirts and pairs of jeans. He was getting pretty sick of wearing sweats all the time—especially since he’d just gotten over having to do that because of his hands—but he wasn’t about to wear the G-TAC uniform if he had a choice. Jim added a few pairs of the brand of socks that he liked—apparently the Army-issue ones bothered him in some way. 

The only thing Blair lobbied for that wouldn’t fit in a duffle bag was a coffee maker. He picked out the cheapest one they had—no point giving the next people in their apartment an expensive housewarming gift—but got the best coffee beans available, since those were pretty packable. 

Buying just a few things worked out pretty well—since Blair was on crutches, he couldn’t help carry much, and the guards refused to help. 

When Angel and Kas returned from their shopping trip—which they were escorted on shortly after Jim and Blair got back—Kas was loaded down like a pack mule, and Angel was carrying several bags, too. They had only just put it all down when Kas said, “I think I can get the rest of it on my own.” He shot Jim a look, saying, “I know, but trust me, it’s better for everyone if he’s comfortable, even if we have to leave without half of this crap.”

Jim and Blair helped Angel unpack their purchases. By the time Kas got back, this time toting several different kinds of pillows, a large “bed in a bag” set, and a lamp, the cupboards were fully stocked, and the apartment boasted a more complete set of cooking equipment, a fuzzy orange bath mat, some lap blankets and throw pillows on the couch, and numerous other comforts of home. 

“Oh, books, that was a good idea,” Angel said, glancing over his and Jim’s comparatively meager purchases. 

“Borrow anything you want,” Blair said generously. 

Kas had also bought a deck of cards, which proved to be the most valuable of their purchases, since playing endless games of cards was a good way to kill time. Even with the advantage of a slightly richer material culture, killing time remained a key preoccupation.

In the second week, the guards stopped delivering their food, and took him and Kas out for it instead. Blair wanted to argue about that, at first—he was still on crutches at that point, so sending him out for takeout didn’t make any sense at all—but when they got to the dining hall, or whatever they called it, he found out that there was a lot more to choose from than what the guards had been bringing them. The menus for the rest of the day were posted by the time they went to get breakfast, so what to get for lunch and dinner provided topics for lengthy discussions.

“Parmesan chicken?” Jim would say (or “meatloaf” or “ham slice,” or whatever it was). “That sounds good.”

“You had a hamburger for lunch,” Blair would point out. “You might want to think about eating a little lower on the food chain once in a while, if you value your colon.”

Angel, meanwhile, would ask for something like a single lettuce leaf or one saltine, and Kas would take a half an hour bargaining him up to a chef salad or a bowl of soup with crackers. 

In between food runs and card games, Blair managed to get a pretty solid draft of his Guide lore paper written. It had been a while since he’d written a paper longhand in a spiral notebook, and not having access to any books or library databases was a problem, but on the other hand, he did have 24-hour access to an interview subject with nothing better to do than answer his questions. It was probably a wash. He could go back and add some references later. 

With plenty of food, Jim right there, and the paper to write, Blair probably would have been more or less content, except that any time Blair made a move, Jim looked scandalized and pointed out in a whisper that Angel and Kas were “ _right over there_!”

“And? They’re doing it two, three times a day.” That was only a slight exaggeration—Kas was apparently not above bribing Angel to get out of bed in the mornings with the promise of shower sex, nor was he above bribing him back into it at night with the promise of more sex. Blair wished he had thought of being so neurotic he could only cope if provided with hot and cold running orgasms, but there was no way Jim would buy it at this point.

“It would be weird,” Jim insisted. “Angel could _hear_ us.”

“You can hear them,” Blair pointed out. _He_ could hear them.

“And it’s weird.”

If they were going to be trapped here for long, Jim was going to have to get over it, but before Blair managed to convince him, there was a change in routine. The guards started taking them out for exercise, two at a time—him and Jim in the mornings, Angel and Kas in the afternoons. The hour they spent each morning in the small, unimpressively equipped gym was nothing to write home about, but in the afternoons he had an hour of privacy with his own, much more impressively equipped Jim, which more than made up for it.

Angel periodically protested about being dragged off to the gym—it smelled bad, and watching Kas lift weights was boring, and he’d rather take a nap—but Kas always managed to get him out the door before Blair had to strangle him, so that was all right.

The first sign that maybe they weren’t going to be spending the rest of their lives in the senior enlisted housing apartment came on Monday of the third week, when just after breakfast, instead of taking him and Jim to the gym, the guards took all four of them to a shooting range. Jim, Kas, and Angel were each handed a rifle—the kind Blair had seen only in war movies and newspaper photographs of soldiers in foreign countries. 

“Since you’ve been out of active service, you need to re-qualify,” one of the guards explained. 

Angel held his like it was an alien artifact he’d never seen before, looking wide-eyed and stunned. “How come he doesn’t have to?” he asked. When he turned to indicate Blair, he also pointed his gun in Blair’s direction. Kas and Jim both dived for him; fortunately, Kas got there first, and repositioned Angel’s grip much more gently than Jim probably would have, so that he was aiming at the ground. 

Once that was done, Jim said, “He’s a civilian.”

“Can I be a civilian too?” Angel asked. 

“No,” Jim and Kas both said. 

It took Jim about ten seconds to demonstrate to the guards’ satisfaction that he remembered how the big scary gun worked, at which point Kas was still trying to get Angel to hold his right. 

Jim came over to where Blair was sitting, taking off his ear protection. Blair took off his, too—it didn’t look like Angel or Kas was going to be firing any time soon. “If they’re sending us somewhere that we’ll need these, you should know how they work,” Jim said, sitting next to him and holding out the gun. “So here’s how you tell if it’s loaded.”

All other things being equal, Blair would have preferred to let “automatic weapons” remain one of his areas of ignorance, but Angel wasn’t making ignorance look particularly attractive, or safe—and, he supposed, the chances that he’d be in a situation where he _really, really wished_ he knew more about the subject were greater than the chances that he’d ever be in a position to wish he knew less. By the time Angel had advanced to actually firing, Blair knew how to tell if the big scary gun was loaded, how to load and unload it, and what to do if it jammed. 

Back in the apartment, they had no sooner shut the door behind themselves than Angel said, “Okay, what the fuck was that about?”

“I don’t know, Ang,” Kas said, herding him over toward the couch. “Probably just a—I don’t know, don’t worry about it,” he suggested weakly.

“They wouldn’t make me play with guns if they were sending us back to Walter Reed,” Angel said. “We were at Walter Reed for ten years, and nobody made me shoot anything.” 

“Maybe they always do it when they reactivate people,” Kas suggested. “Like the corporal said.”

“Or maybe they’re sending us _to a fucking war zone_!”

“We don’t know that,” Kas tried again. 

“But they could be! We don’t know they’re not!”

“Try to relax,” Kas told him. “We don’t know anything--”

“Like that helps?” Angel sounded near tears. “Fuck—fucking—fuck. We should never have—we should have fucking left him there.”

“You selfish little prick,” Kas said wonderingly.

Blair wasn’t sure which of them to be more shocked by, and before he could decide, Jim grabbed his arm and dragged him into their bedroom. 

#

Jim managed to master the impulse to wring the other Sentinel’s neck long enough to drag his Guide into their bedroom and shut the door behind them.

“Shouldn’t we—that was—we should--” Blair’s hands flew around his face like birds as he tried to find an ending for that sentence.

“Give them some privacy?” Jim said. “Yes.” Not that he really cared about that, but if Blair went out there and tried to make peace between Kas and Angel, Jim would have to go with him. 

Kas was doing just fine on his own, anyway—back out in the living room, Jim could hear him saying, “—unhappy, but that does _not_ give you a free pass to be an asshole, Angelito.”

Angel’s reply was soft enough that Jim would have had to make an effort to hear it, and he knew better than to do that. Anyway, Blair, flopping down onto his bunk despondently, was saying, “He kind of has a point. They’d still be home, if I hadn’t….”

“Gotten yourself kidnapped?” Jim demanded. “Right, yeah, you should have realized that getting abducted would screw things up for our friends. I’m sure the G-TAC goons would have understood if you’d explained it that way.”

“I know, it’s not that,” Blair said. “But we dragged them into this whole… _thing_.”

“We asked for help. There was no dragging. I told them—that night, when we broke in to G-TAC, I told them they didn’t have to help.”

Blair shook his head, still looking tense and unhappy. “Angel’s—you know. Angel. I think he has this idea that if you do the right thing, everything will be okay.” 

“He’s over forty years old,” Jim said. “If he doesn’t know better by now, that’s his own damn fault. He’s not a child. It’s not your job—or mine—to protect him.” It really _shouldn’t_ be Kas’s either, and Jim absolutely refused to be sorry that Kas had decided that saving Blair from being tortured was more important than making sure his Sentinel didn’t get his feelings hurt. 

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” Blair tucked his hands behind his head for a second, a thoughtful little frown on his face, then suddenly sat bolt upright. “ _Are_ they sending us to a fucking war zone?”

“I don’t know, Chief,” Jim said. Kas _could_ be right that it was standard procedure to make them requalify on the M-4 after being recalled to active duty—Jim had never been recalled before, so he didn’t know. But somehow, he doubted it. 

“What if they’re sending us on some kind of suicide mission? Like in the _Dirty Dozen_?” Blair suggested, jumping up and starting to pace between the bunks.

“They wouldn’t do that,” Jim said automatically.

“No?” Blair stared at him. “You really think not?”

Jim ran a hand over his face. Life was so much easier back when he had trusted his government. “I think it’s unlikely.”

“Unlikely. Yeah.” Blair threw himself back onto the bunk. “This really, really sucks.” 

“Well,” Jim said slowly. “If there was a suicide mission, it would be out of the country,” he pointed out. 

“And?”

“And the plan, before we were captured, was to flee the country.”

Blair considered that. “Oh.”

“So don’t worry about that.” A legitimate combat mission would be worse, in a way. Especially if they gave him men to lead. He couldn’t just _desert_. Not if his men were counting on him. But they still didn’t know what the hell was happening. Hell, maybe they were sending him to Fort Benning to be a drill instructor. That would be—okay, it would be weird as hell, but completely doable. Hell, Sandburg had been a teacher—would be again, if Jim had anything to say about it. He could help. “We’re going to be fine,” Jim said. “Even if they do send us over to the Sandbox—it’s not like in the movies. Hardly anyone gets killed. We’ll be fine.” 

“Sandbox?” Blair asked.

“The mid-East. Iraq, Kuwait, wherever the action is these days. The desert. You know. Sandbox.” 

“Right.” Blair nodded, probably making a mental note for his paper about linguistic markers of in-group membership. He spent hours every day scribbling in his notebooks, when he wasn’t hounding him or Kas for more information, dredging up bits of information that Jim, for one, had no idea he’d even remembered. “Working,” on his paper that there was a good chance no one would ever read, just like Jim planned out his daily hour in the gym for maximum efficiency, honing his body into a perfect machine for another day of sitting around the apartment staring at the walls. 

Jim realized with some surprise that he almost _hoped_ they were being sent to the mid-East, just for the sake of having something to _do_. It was as selfish, in its own way, as what Angel had said—no matter how reassuring Jim tried to be, Blair wouldn’t like combat service one bit, and Angel—well, they all knew how Angel felt about it. 

“We’ll be fine,” Jim said again. 

Blair sat up again, hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands. “This isn’t…” he said to the floor.

“Isn’t what?” Jim asked, when it became clear that the rest of the sentence was nowhere on the horizon.

“It isn’t right. They shouldn’t be able to do this.” 

It was nothing new—Angel had been saying it for the entire time they’d been stuck here—but mixed in with all of his complaints about the food, the noise, the gym, and everything else, the essential not-rightness of the situation had become part of the backdrop of their lives. With Angel talking about it all the time, it was like the rest of them didn’t have to think about it. 

But now Blair was dragging it all out into the open. “We shouldn’t be here. We should be at the police department—you should be at the police department. I should be getting ready to start my class at Rainier. They should be at the hospital. This is all--” His anxious gesture took in the room, the apartment, maybe the entire base. “This is wrong.” 

“I know,” Jim said, sitting next to him and patting his shoulder. Hell, if they were going there, Blair _should be_ in Spain, newly-minted doctorate in hand, doing whatever it is PhDs did just after they graduated. Looking for a job, Jim supposed.

Or if things were the way they _should be_ , he wouldn’t have had to leave the country in the first place. So maybe he’d have just finished his doctorate from an American university. Jim wouldn’t know him, and that would hurt, but that was how it should be. But he didn’t want to say any of that, so instead he just gave Sandburg another pat. 

Blair shook him off. “Don’t. I’m not--” He jumped to his feet and started pacing again. “They can’t just _do_ this. We shouldn’t be fucking _cooperating_. Collaborating. They can’t—you realize this _worked_ , for them? This is nothing but a power play. ‘You make waves, and we’ll show you what we can do.’ And we just said, okay, yes sir, I guess we’ll sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.”

Blair made a sudden break for the door, and Jim blocked him, putting his body between his Guide and the exit. “What are you trying to do?” Jim asked.

“Stand the fuck up,” Blair said grimly. 

Jim could have stopped him; in hindsight, he should have. But he wasn’t in the habit of using his size and strength to get his own way—not unless an arrest was at stake—so when Blair shoved him away from the door, he stepped aside and followed him out into the living room, saying, “Where are you going?”

“Out,” Blair said flatly, making for the front door. 

Jim realized with a horrifying certainty that he was seeing exactly how Blair had wound up chained to that wall in the G-TAC training suite, having every finger on his hands broken. Blair, he knew, did not have a plan, not one that went any further than forcing a confrontation, making somebody, _anybody_ push him, so that he could push back. 

Kas, over on the couch with Angel in his lap, said, “Blair, I really don’t think--”

Blair yanked the door open. The two soldiers guarding the door turned to face them. “What do you want?” the senior man, a PFC, asked. 

“I’m leaving,” Blair said. Glancing back over his shoulder at Jim, he said, “Coming?”

“Chief, don’t be stupid,” Jim pleaded. 

The PFC’s eyes slid over Blair and up to Jim. “Sir, we can’t let you do that.” 

“I know,” he told them. “Chief,” he tried again, taking Blair’s arm.

Blair shook him off. Pushing his way up to the two guards, he put his chin up said, “I’m walking out that door, getting in that elevator, calling a cab, and going the fuck home. What are you going to do, shoot me?”

The two guards were stunned enough that Blair actually squeezed between them before they got their thumbs out of their asses. When they did, they moved closer to the door, hands on their sidearms, blocking _him_ inside. “Blair,” he called. 

Blair turned around, holding his hands up. “What? You want to stop me, stop me.”

Jim wasn’t sure if Blair was taunting him or the guards. He didn’t think the guards knew, either, but one of them was turning to face Sandburg, his sidearm sliding just a half-inch out of the holster, and that was _not_ happening. He was _not_ watching his Guide gunned down in front of him because the stupid kid didn’t know when to quit.

Shouldering his way past the two guards, Jim knocked Blair to the ground, shielding him with his body, pinning him to the thinly-carpeted floor with his greater weight. 

Blair fought him, thrashing like a fish on a line. Jim was vaguely aware of the two guards calling for backup, of those of their neighbors who weren’t on duty coming to stand in the doors of their rooms, but he couldn’t spare a moment’s thought for them. Holding Sandburg down took all of his concentration. He was smaller, but he was strong, and flexible, and not above taking advantage of Jim’s obvious desire not to hurt him. Pinning Blair’s wrists with his hands was easy enough, but that left him free to kick. Jim didn’t quite know how to hold Blair’s legs down without hurting his knee—he was off the crutches now, but it was still tender. 

The best he could come up with was to sit on Blair’s hips and let him thrash until he wore himself out. Blair wasn’t quiet about it—he kept up a constant stream of curses and insults, demands, threats, and pleas, everything from, “Let me go, you fucking caveman! Are you getting off on this, you sick fuck? Get off, get off, get off!” to, “Jim, please, man, you gotta—you can’t, _Jim_.”

Eventually, Jim tuned him out, listening past what he was saying to the frantic pounding of his heart and his harsh, ragged breathing. Eventually his protests turned to great, hiccupping sobs, then to quiet sniffles, and finally, silence. 

When Hurricane Sandburg had finally subsided, Jim helped him to his feet and led him, past the gauntlet of guards, back into the apartment. Kas and Angel were both standing there, watching and waiting for some kind of an explanation, but with Blair hanging limply off of him, Jim just waved them away. Fumbling with the door lock, he said, “Kas, could you—that chair—“

Jim couldn’t quite manage to explain that he wanted the chair propped under the doorknob, so it couldn’t be opened from the outside, but Kas figured it out, fortunately. While Kas took care of securing the door, Jim steered Blair into their room and sat him down on the bed. He sat meekly, staring at the floor, as Jim knelt down to help him get his shoes off.

“Jim?” Blair said in a small voice.

“Yeah, Chief?” Jim asked, wondering what Blair could possibly have to say for himself.

“My head hurts.” 

Okay then. “I’m not surprised.” Jim left unsaid that it would hurt a lot more if the guards had put a bullet through it. 

He wanted to shake Blair until his teeth rattled, demand to know what the hell he had been thinking, if he didn’t _realize_ that if he got himself killed, that was _it_ , for Jim as well as for himself? But it didn’t seem like the time, so he just undressed Blair and tucked him into bed like an overtired child, giving him a kiss and a cool cloth for his forehead. 

Blair had exhausted himself struggling, and he was asleep by the time Jim quietly drew the blinds and tiptoed out of the room.

The other two were sitting side-by-side on the couch now, Angel pressed into Kas’s side like a duckling under its mother’s wing. Jim sat in the armchair, unconsciously leaving space for Blair, who if he were awake would be perched on the arm of the chair, leaning on him for balance. 

They were all silent for a long moment, not quite looking at each other. Finally Angel—who was a brave little bastard, even though he tried like hell not to be—said timidly, “Is he okay?”

“Yeah,” Jim said. He hoped so. “He’ll be okay.”

“I shouldn’t have--” Angel stopped abruptly and swallowed hard. “I shouldn’t have.”

“It wasn’t you,” Jim told him. Not mostly, anyway. Maybe a little bit.

Kas glanced over at the closed door to his and Blair’s room. “What was he--?”

“Thinking? He wasn’t.”

Jim sat with an eye on the door, trying to keep his mind a blank, not to anticipate trouble that he had no way of preparing for, no defense against. But when the knock at the door finally came, and Kas opened it a crack, Jim standing behind him and Angel keeping well back, the guards just shoved four Styrofoam boxes of lunch at them, and left again. 

It was fried chicken. Not bad, really, but Jim and Kas ate theirs mechanically, and Angel—unsurprisingly—picked his apart without putting so much as a molecule in his mouth. 

Another hour later, Blair slunk out of the bedroom. He stopped about three feet away from Jim and shifted nervously from one foot to the other, wincing a little when he put his full weight on the bad knee. 

“Feeling better?” Jim finally said.

“Uh…yeah,” Blair said. “Yeah, I—sorry.”

Jim nodded. “It’s okay, Chief,” he said, because really, what else could he say? There was no telling how he might have made things worse for them, but nothing either of them could do now would change anything. “You hungry? You missed lunch.”

Over the next few days, Jim remained on edge, but the only consequence of Blair’s aborted escape attempt that emerged was that it he and Blair lost their exercise privileges, and it became Kas and Angel’s job to go pick up their food. 

None of them commented on the change, or the reason for it. Blair took to spending even more time writing in his notebooks, something Jim wouldn’t have thought possible. He stopped asking Jim and Kas questions, though. Some new project? Jim didn’t ask, and resolutely did not examine the reasons why not.

#

“Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.” Jim was on the floor in front of the couch, cranking out pushups, while Kas and Angel were out at the gym.

Scowling down at his notebook, Blair scratched out where he had just written, the _further evidence for this phenomenon is 42_. “For Christ’s sake, can’t you _count to yourself_?”

Jim ignored him and kept counting. 

“Come on,” Blair said, nudging him with his foot. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

“ _Fifty-two_ ,” Jim said loudly. “ _Fifty-three_.”

Blair nudged him again, harder. “Stop it!”

“Fifty-five, fifty-six.”

Jim was being so fucking _implacable_ , like he was a _wall_ or something, just like he had been for the last few days. Blair had, at first, been almost pants-wettingly grateful that Jim wasn’t mad at him, but now, suddenly, it seemed grossly offensive, as if Jim didn’t even _care_ enough to get mad at him. “For God’s sake, just shut the fuck up for ten fucking seconds!” he screamed, planting one foot on Jim’s ribs and _shoving_ as hard as he could.

Thrown off balance, Jim fell onto his side, but managed to turn the fall into a smooth roll that ended with him on his feet. “You trying to start something, Sandburg?”

“I’m trying to _stop_ something,” Blair shot back. “You.”

“Yeah? Well why don’t you can the attitude, Chief?”

He should have known it would come to this. “You wanna make me?”

Jim breathed hard, his nostrils flaring, that little muscle in his jaw twitching as he ground his teeth. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Blair asked, shoving at his chest.

“Don’t _push_ me.” 

“Maybe I want to push you,” Blair answered, shoving him again.

“Knock it off,” Jim said, brushing his hands away. 

It was so fucking _dismissive_ , to have Jim batting him away like he was a gnat or something. With a growl, he reared back and slammed his fist into Jim’s jaw.

#

When they stepped out of the elevator, Angel stopped short. 

“What?” Kas asked. 

“There’s something wrong with Blair and Jim.”

Tucking Angel behind him, Kas hurried down the hallway. By the time they reached the door, even Kas could hear sounds of a struggle from the other side. The two guards looked profoundly unconcerned; Kas spared a moment to glare at them before rushing into the apartment.

Once inside, he stopped short, just before he tripped over Jim and Blair, grappling fiercely on the floor.

“Fucking asshole,” Blair said, trying to bring a knee up into Jim’s crotch. “What, this makes you feel like a real fucking man?” When that didn’t work, he tried to sit up and buck Jim off of himself. “Well, see how you--”

“You just have to keep _pushing_ , don’t you?” Jim demanded, slamming Blair back down, his head hitting the floor with a _thunk_ like a rotten pumpkin. 

Kas threw out his arm to hold Angel back from leaping to Blair’s rescue. “Wait.”

Blair recovered quickly, twisting onto his side and driving an elbow into Jim’s abdomen.

Yeah. Whatever Blair needed, rescuing from his Sentinel wasn’t it. 

“ _Gentlemen_ ,” Kas bellowed. 

Both men froze, Jim on his back wheezing and Blair getting his feet under him. “Um, hi,” Blair said. 

“Hi,” Kas said. “You want to explain yourselves?”

“Not,” Jim gasped, “particularly.” 

“Jim wouldn’t stop _counting_ ,” Blair said.

“And?”

“So I hit him.” 

“I see.” Kas glanced back at Angel. He was wide-eyed, a little shaken—he didn’t like it when people fought—but okay. “Are you _finished_?”

“Um. Yeah. I think so.” Blair got to his feet and backed up until he ran into the armchair, then turned it upright and sat down. “Jim, are you okay?”

Jim sat up, breathing more easily now. “Peachy.”

“Good,” Blair said. “Uh. Sorry.” 

“Yeah,” Jim said, rubbing his jaw, where a multicolored bruise was rapidly forming. “Sorry.” He got up and moved stiffly over to the couch. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What’s _wrong_ with me?” Blair echoed. “Christ, Jim, do you want that alphabetically or categorically? I’m being held captive by the United States Army. I have no idea what they’re planning to do with me, and my previous experience of being abducted and held against my will by government organizations hasn’t given me much reason to be optimistic about what they have in mind. Both of these government organizations have given you absolute power over me, which even though you’re not being an asshole about it, is still not something I’m particularly happy about. Half the world, including my _mother_ has just read about how I was tortured, and I can’t get in touch with her to find out how she’s dealing with it. I don’t have anything good to read, I’ve had it up to here with looking at the same four walls every day, and I’d give my right arm to have a conversation with somebody who isn’t one of the three of you.” Blair ticked these items off on his fingers, then finally dropped his hand, saying, “And then, to top it all off, you won’t stop counting!”

“Okay,” Jim said. “But apart from the counting thing, what do you want me to do about any of that?”

Blair threw up his hands. “Nothing! Just stop being so fucking _calm_ about it!”

“I don’t see how _not_ being calm about it will help anything.”

“See?” Blair demanded, looking at him and Angel for support. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

“What?” Jim asked, obviously confused. 

“You can’t just _be calm_ when everything’s going to shit, just because it’s the most reasonable thing to do.” 

“Why not?”

“Because!” Blair started to stand up; Kas pushed him gently but firmly back into his seat. “It’s irritating.” 

“I don’t see why.”

“I know you don’t! Look,” Blair said, getting up and gathering up his notebooks and pens. “I’m going to go in our room and be by myself for a while. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jim said meekly. “Bye.” After Blair had left, Jim said, “I don’t get why he didn’t just do that to begin with, if the counting bothered him that much.”

“What were you counting?” Angel asked, edging closer to the couch, but looking like he was ready to bolt if the yelling started up again.

“Pushups.”

“Oh. Um, d’you _have_ to count them out loud?” Angel wondered.

“No,” Jim snapped. Angel skittered away. “He was being obnoxious.” 

So Jim had decided to be obnoxious right back, Kas interpreted, catching Angel and rubbing his back soothingly. It was hard to blame him—if Blair hadn’t freaked out and decided to antagonize their guards with a clearly fruitless escape attempt, he and Jim would still have exercise privileges. 

And that wasn’t exactly a new problem, Blair making a bad situation worse for himself out of sheer cussedness. Kas and Jim had talked about it before. 

“He feels powerless,” Kas finally said. “There’s nothing he can do to make anything any better; the only choices are either to do nothing or make things worse.”

“That’s why all the rest of us are doing nothing,” Jim pointed out.

But if he was making things worse, at least he had some influence, if not control, of the situation. Kas understood that one. “But,” Kas said, “being a stubborn little bastard is one of the things you like about Blair.” 

“Right now, I’m having a hard time remembering why.”

There wasn’t anything Kas could say to that, so he moved on to beginning lunch negotiations with Angel. 

#

By lunch time, Blair still hadn’t come out of their room. Before Angel and Kas left to get the food, they tried to get him to at least say what he wanted to eat, but he just yelled through the door that he didn’t care, and to leave him alone. 

Sitting on the couch and paging angrily through one of Blair’s books, Jim wanted nothing more than to go into the bedroom and initiate a discussion of manners and why Blair should have some, but he had a feeling that coming home to find him and Blair fighting again would put Angel off his feed, and that in turn would upset Kas. So far, not _everyone_ in the apartment was pissed off at everybody else, and he should probably try to keep it that way.

At the sound of a sharp, authoritative knock at the door, he jumped, dropping the book. Eyeing the door warily, Jim listened to what was happening on the other side. The two guards were there, and someone else. Not Kas or Angel. Cautiously, he opened the door.

A first lieutenant was standing there, dressed in class A’s. He saluted crisply; Jim returned the salute. 

“Sir, General Jeffries asked me to deliver these sealed orders. You are to discuss these orders with no one not named in the orders. You leave in three days.”

Jim took the envelope the lieutenant was holding out to him. “Thanks. Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

Jim walked slowly back to the couch, opening the envelope as he went. 

The orders…didn’t make a lot of sense. He was still studying them when Angel and Kas came back. 

“What’s that?” Kas asked, holding out a takeout box. 

Jim took it. “Thanks. We’re being shipped out.” The others were, fortunately, named in the orders, so he didn’t have to try to keep them secret. 

Angel squeaked, dropping his own box of food. 

“It’s not that bad, it’s just…odd.” Giving a wide berth to Angel’s spilled food, he went over to their room and tapped on the door. “Blair?”

“What?”

“We just found out what’s happening next. Do you want to hear about it now or later?”

Blair came out of the room. “What’s going on?”

“I’m just about to explain.” 

They all took seats, Blair accepting a box of food from Kas. Angel was a tense, unhappy lump huddled against Kas’s side.

“They’re sending us to Peru,” Jim said. “To an installation owned by the US military, that has been leased to a private corporation to develop mineral resources,” he summarized from the printed orders. “We’re…guarding it. The four of us, a corporal, and three privates. We leave Friday morning.” 

Everyone was silent for a moment. “That’s insane,” Kas said. “There’s no way they need two Sentinels, two Rangers, and three officers for that.”

“I know,” Jim said. 

“What am _I_ supposed to do there?” Angel asked.

“You are supposed to provide routine and emergency care to the assigned personnel and emergency care to the civilian population,” Jim summarized. “And you’re my second in command.” 

Angel glanced nervously up at Kas, who gave him a squeeze. To Jim, Kas said, “It might be better if….”

“Right,” Jim said. “Let’s say you’re my acting 2IC.”

“That’ll work,” Kas said. 

“Does it say where in Peru?” Blair asked.

Jim paged through the orders. “Loreto province. Does that mean anything to you?”

Blair nodded. “I’ve been to the Amazonas region; Loreto is next to it. It’s mostly rain forest, very remote, very sparsely populated.” 

The picture was starting to come together. “They’re sending us to the middle of nowhere,” Jim said.

“That’s what it sounds like,” Blair agreed. “It makes sense—they’ve been going to a lot of trouble to make sure we’re completely cut off from the outside world. Now they’re giving us a make-work job in a place where the geography will do it for them.”

“It doesn’t sound like it’ll be so bad,” Kas said, patting Angel’s shoulder. “Probably not too dangerous.” 

“Does it say how long we have to stay?” Angel asked.

“No,” Jim said. He had looked for that. “Until they tell us otherwise, I guess.”

“Great,” Blair groused. 

None of them was particularly happy about the orders, but preparations for their departure kept them busy and away from each other’s throats for the next few days. They had to get more shots, re-qualify with more weapons, attend briefings, and visit the quartermaster and the BX for the supplies and equipment that they would need. Jim had no idea if he was being irritatingly calm about their upcoming deployment, but Blair didn’t say anything about it, so he hoped he was doing all right. 

The night before they were due to leave, they turned in early. After shutting off the light, Jim lay there listening to Blair shifting around in his bed—turning over, punching the pillow, moving his arms from outside the covers to inside, then back out again. 

Jim managed to tune out the racket and fall into a light doze, only to wake up when a draft of cold air crept under his blanket, followed by a warm body. Jim feigned sleep as Blair tucked himself up against Jim’s chest, pulling Jim’s arm around him.


End file.
